CINEMA

News, reviews and features on cinema

Cinema

The Social Reckoning brings Aaron Sorkin back to Facebook, but moviegoers aren't following

Sixteen years ago, The Social Network turned Facebook's origins into a riveting drama. Now Aaron Sorkin is returning to the company's history from a darker direction. The Social Reckoning explores the revelations that exposed concerns about the platform's influence on society. Yet its opening box office suggests that public interest in the controversy has not translated into an equally strong appetite for the movie.

By Tori

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Cinema

Avengers: Doomsday Has Already Cleared A$1 Million in Australian Presales

Avengers: Doomsday does not reach Australian cinemas until December 17, but Disney already has its first seven-figure talking point. More than A$1 million in tickets were sold during the first 24 hours of the latest presale launch. It is a notable measure of committed demand. It is not, however, a miniature version of the final box office.

By Tori
Cinema

Maha Harada's First Film Leaves San Sebastián with Two Awards

Maha Harada has spent much of her literary career writing about the spaces where art and ordinary lives meet. Her first feature as a director stays remarkably close to that territory. Muyou no hito, internationally titled In My Father's Room, has emerged from the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival with two parallel awards before its Japanese theatrical release next January.

By Clarel
Cinema

Bona's First AI Feature Has a Date: Sanxingdui Reaches Chinese Theaters October 23

Sanxingdui: Future Memories is moving from technology showcase to theatrical product. Bona Film Group has set an October 23, 2026 Chinese release for its hyperrealistic AI-assisted science-fiction feature, months after the movie received the public-screening permit required to enter cinemas. That distinction matters: regulatory approval was the first threshold. A nationwide release puts the experiment in front of an actual market.

By Tori
Cinema

Asian cinema is thriving, sometimes more than Hollywood — just not in the way you might think

The interesting story in cinema right now is not that Asia has somehow defeated Hollywood. It is that the old hierarchy has become less reliable. Several of the world's biggest theatrical markets overwhelmingly prefer domestic films, Asian productions have expanded their share of global admissions, and a Chinese animation became 2025's worldwide box-office leader. At the same time, Hollywood has just enjoyed its strongest post-pandemic summer in North America. Both things can be true.

By Tori
Cinema

The Assassin(s) Takes Chuseok: 1.56 Million Admissions in Five Days in Korea

Several major releases were competing for Korean moviegoers over Chuseok. The Assassin(s) emerged with the largest audience. Released on September 23, Hur Jin-ho's new film finished its first weekend with 1,199,156 admissions and had already reached a cumulative 1,566,222 viewers by Sunday, according to the Korean Film Council.

By Tori
Cinema

Godzilla Minus Zero Was Hiding Its Second Monster: Ghidorah Has Entered the Battle

It took the lights going down at the New York Film Festival. After months of trailers referring only to a “new threat,” Godzilla Minus Zero finally showed its hand at its September 26 world premiere: Ghidorah is in the movie. And Takashi Yamazaki is not treating Godzilla's famous adversary as a tiny final-act surprise. The three-headed monster is directly tied to the new disaster striking Japan in 1949.

By Vever
Cinema

Lindsay Lohan Reunites with Mark Waters as Netflix Sets Return to You with Henry Golding

Netflix has found an unusually efficient way to sell a new romance before showing much of the movie itself: reunite Lindsay Lohan with Mark Waters. The director of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls will helm Return to You, starring Henry Golding opposite Lohan. The film is now in production, although Netflix has not announced a release date.

By Tori
Cinema

Marvel Studios Has Crossed $35 Billion, and Its Back Catalogue Is Still Working

Marvel Studios has another absurdly large number for the corporate history book. Disney says its 38 films have now generated a cumulative $35.075 billion at the worldwide box office. Avengers: Endgame Encore pushed the total over the threshold this weekend, but the more revealing story is how Marvel can use a seven-year-old blockbuster to sell tickets again while simultaneously advertising the next Avengers movie.

By Tori
Cinema

Forgotten Island Opens to $20.6 Million, Leaving DreamWorks to Bet on Staying Power

Forgotten Island had the reviews, the audience reception and the DreamWorks name. What it lacked on its first North American weekend was more moviegoers. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado's film opened to $12.8 million domestically and brought its worldwide total to $20.6 million. For Universal, what happens after opening weekend is already becoming more important than the opening itself.

By Tori
Cinema

Brad Pitt Takes Heart of the Beast to a $50.1 Million Global Opening

Heart of the Beast did not win the weekend, but its first worldwide tally looks considerably stronger than its North American number alone suggests. Paramount's Brad Pitt vehicle opened to an estimated $50.1 million globally, with roughly 60% of that total coming from international markets.

By Tori
Cinema

Avengers: Endgame Returns to Theaters and Already Pulls In $86 Million

Seven years after its original run, Avengers: Endgame can apparently still fill theaters. Disney estimates that the Encore rerelease opened to $86 million worldwide, pushing the movie's lifetime total to roughly $2.885 billion and putting Avatar within striking distance once again.

By Tori
Cinema

Universal crosses $5 billion worldwide with three billion-dollar movies built on very different models

Universal has won a race that no studio officially enters but every major distributor watches. On September 25, its film business crossed $5 billion at the worldwide box office in 2026 before any competitor. The scale is impressive — $1.788 billion domestically and $3.218 billion internationally — but the composition is more revealing: Christopher Nolan, Nintendo and Illumination, a Lionsgate biopic distributed overseas, the Minions and a thriller made for less than $1 million.

By Tori
Cinema

Endgame makes $3.8 million again as Marvel turns a rerelease into paid Doomsday marketing

Avengers: Endgame is back in theaters as though 2019 never entirely ended. The Encore edition earned $3.8 million from North American Thursday previews and is currently projected to make more than $25 million over the weekend. Marvel is not simply putting its former box-office champion back on screens, however. Endgame has been rebuilt into a direct runway for Avengers: Doomsday, due December 18, with additional material designed specifically to connect the old event movie to the new one.

By Tori
Cinema

Rob Minkoff is circling Storm Dogs as Particle 6 pushes AI into a family feature

Particle 6 is trying to move its artificial-intelligence pitch from synthetic personalities into a conventional family-movie structure. Rob Minkoff, co-director of The Lion King and director of Stuart Little, is in advanced discussions to develop and executive produce Storm Dogs. The pairing is easy to understand: a filmmaker whose career repeatedly involved believable animal characters is being brought into a story carried by five photorealistic dogs and a two-year-old child. What is much less developed is the movie around that idea. There is no announced distributor, no public cast and only a 2027 production target.

By Tori
Cinema Review 7/10

The Transformers: The Movie: 85 Minutes of Metal, Rock and Grief

Built inside an enormous toy-selling machine, The Transformers: The Movie could easily have been a feature-length commercial with better projection. Its ferocious first act, ambitious animation, surprisingly permanent deaths and a voice cast that somehow includes both Orson Welles and Leonard Nimoy gave it something more: a personality. Forty years later, the storytelling remains messy, but its energy is remarkably difficult to reproduce.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 7/10

Coyote vs. Acme: The Case Is Won, Even If the Looney Tunes Anarchy Isn't

Rescued after nearly disappearing into Warner's vaults, Coyote vs. Acme more than justifies making it to theaters. Dave Green turns the Looney Tunes' eternal loser into the perfect plaintiff for a smart, frequently funny courtroom comedy anchored by Will Forte and John Cena. The feature loses momentum whenever its conspiracy plot takes over and never quite reaches the gleeful violence of Chuck Jones' shorts, but it understands Wile E. Coyote well enough to justify its 103 minutes.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 6/10

Practical Magic 2: Bullock and Kidman Still Have the Magic, the Movie Less So

Twenty-eight years after the original film, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as the Owens sisters in a sequel designed as one enormous magical family reunion. Their chemistry, Franny and Jet and a handful of affecting generational moments still cast a spell. But 130 minutes of nostalgia, romance and overloaded mythology gradually dilute what should have been the real event: watching these women together again.

By Clarel
Cinema

A seven-year-old Avengers movie is starting ahead of the new releases

Three new wide releases arrive with Robert Pattinson, Brad Pitt and an original DreamWorks animated film. The title currently ahead of all three was released in 2019. Avengers: Endgame Encore took roughly $3.8 million from North American previews, giving Marvel’s reissue an early lead over Primetime, Heart of the Beast and Forgotten Island. Preview figures are not perfectly comparable and they are not final weekend grosses, but they make for an unusually neat snapshot of the theatrical business.

By Tori
Cinema

The New Saw Movie Finds Its Director as Mike P. Nelson Enters the Game With James Wan

Saw's new ownership structure now has an actual movie attached to it. Mike P. Nelson will direct the next installment for Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic Monster, with James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Jason Blum producing. One detail in the first announcement is already worth preserving: the script shown on screen is labeled UNTITLED SAW.

By Tori
Cinema

Hollow Eyes Belmont Cameli for Brom Bones Opposite Sydney Sweeney

Hollow is beginning to put faces to a very old rivalry. Belmont Cameli is set to play Brom Bones opposite Sydney Sweeney's Katrina Van Tassel, according to Deadline, in a Sony project that rebuilds The Legend of Sleepy Hollow around a different point of view.

By Clarel
Cinema

Netflix Extends Sesame Street Through Season 62 and Adds a Film Project

Netflix has secured a much longer future with Sesame Street. Its deal with Sesame Workshop now covers new seasons through Season 62, while a separate film project brings Rideback into a partnership that increasingly looks like a broader franchise strategy.

By Tori
Cinema Review 7/10

Justin the Just: Alban Ivanov Finds Real Weight Amid the Absurdity

Eric Barbier turns the Great War into a picaresque fable about obedience, friendship and revolt. Justin the Just is carried by Alban Ivanov, Birane Ba and a strikingly physical reconstruction, even when its humanist message becomes overly explicit and its final act stretches credibility.

By Clarel
Cinema

Ray Gunn builds the future as if 1939 never ended

Ray Gunn has flying cars, robots and skyscrapers that appear to have forgotten when to stop growing, but nobody told Brad Bird that film noir was supposed to stay in the past. The first trailer finally reveals the central trick behind a project he has carried for more than three decades: this is not our future. It is the future a filmmaker in 1939 might have imagined, with an old-fashioned private detective dropped right into the middle of it.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 7/10

Garance review: Adèle Exarchopoulos drinks in every frame

Jeanne Herry leaves the ensemble film behind to follow an actress across eight years as alcohol gradually shifts from social fuel to dependency. Garance relies heavily on Adèle Exarchopoulos, superb in the tiny variations of denial and exhaustion, but also finds balance through Sara Giraudeau and editing that favors an accumulation of small damage over one grand collapse.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 7/10

Heart of the Beast review: Brad Pitt, a dog and survival stripped to its essentials

David Ayer largely leaves armed crews and criminal conspiracies behind to strand Brad Pitt against nature with an extraordinarily expressive German Shepherd at his side. Heart of the Beast is simple, predictable and occasionally too sentimental, but its narrative directness, landscapes and especially the bond between man and dog give it disarming effectiveness.

By Clarel
Cinema

The Love Hypothesis is now on Prime Video as Amazon turns Ali Hazelwood's romance hit into a global streaming release

Prime Video has its major September romance. The Love Hypothesis is now available following its September 23 global release, with Lili Reinhart playing a Ph.D. candidate pulled into a fake relationship with Tom Bateman's intimidating professor. Amazon MGM Studios has turned one of Ali Hazelwood's best-known novels into a 112-minute streaming feature.

By Tori
Cinema Review 7/10

Sense and Sensibility review: Jane Austen finds mud, wind and yearning again

Georgia Oakley has little interest in recreating the immaculately controlled elegance of Ang Lee's film. Her Sense and Sensibility favors loose hair, muddy hems, windswept landscapes and emotions suppressed almost to suffocation. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles make a convincing pair of sisters, although the adaptation's heavier mood occasionally smothers Jane Austen's comic spirit.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 6/10

Her Private Hell review: Nicolas Winding Refn returns with a gorgeous nightmare that sometimes circles itself

Ten years after The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn returns to neon, monumental silences, bodies transformed into icons and stories that behave more like dreams than conventional plots. Her Private Hell is often beautiful and Pino Donaggio gives it extraordinary musical scale, but that beauty serves a film so abstract that its characters and obsessions do not always achieve genuine emotional weight.

By Clarel
Cinema

Hollywood's September 2026 release calendar: Resident Evil, Brad Pitt, Practical Magic 2 and more

September normally sits awkwardly between summer blockbuster season and the fall prestige push. Hollywood has filled that gap rather aggressively in 2026. Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II open the month with a crime thriller, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return for Practical Magic 2, Zach Cregger reboots Resident Evil, and Brad Pitt ends September stranded in Alaska with a combat dog.

By Tori
Cinema

The Family Stone becomes The Families Stone as almost the entire family returns 20 years later

Twenty years later, the Stone house is about to become overcrowded at Christmas again. Searchlight has officially announced The Families Stone, with Tom Bezucha returning to write and direct and almost the entire surviving principal cast coming back. The new family disruption belongs to Kelly this time: he has fallen in love, and he is bringing the woman into the Stone Christmas gathering.

By Yasmine
Cinema

Independent cinema is not short on releases: seven films from around the world to watch right now

Independent cinema does not really have a single global Friday. One film opens in France on Wednesday, another begins in a New York theater two days later, and a third is still moving through festivals while distributors decide where it goes next. Late September 2026 is a particularly good example: the films are there, but their routes to an audience look completely different.

By Clarel
Cinema

Wednesday's International Cinema Releases: Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, Refn and a Busy Korean Opening Day

There is no single worldwide movie-release day. On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, French cinemas are opening several international titles before their US or UK debuts, while South Korea is using its own midweek release cycle for an especially important pre-Chuseok slate. Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, Nicolas Winding Refn, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Lee Min-ho and Lee Chang-dong all have films entering theaters today somewhere in the world.

By Tori
Cinema

Wildwood finally shows its full scale as LAIKA returns after seven years with a forest at war

Seven years without a new LAIKA feature is long enough to make Wildwood feel like a relaunch. The final trailer suggests the opposite. The studio is still committed to puppets, physical environments and frame-by-frame animation; it has simply made the playground much larger. Instead of one haunted house or one small town, Wildwood asks stop-motion to support an entire hidden civilization on the edge of war.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sam Mendes' new Beatles just recreated A Hard Day's Night — and Beatlemania is becoming part of the story

Sam Mendes is not merely dramatizing Beatles history. He is rebuilding some of its most recognizable images. The latest set photographs from The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event show John, George and Ringo sprinting away from screaming fans in a recreation of A Hard Day's Night, only days after the four lead actors reconstructed the band's enormous 1964 homecoming in Liverpool.

By Clarel
Cinema

Cliff Booth is back in 1977, and David Fincher has turned Tarantino's fairy tale into a Hollywood crime story

The fairy tale is over. Netflix uses that phrase to describe The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, and it neatly explains what changes when David Fincher inherits Quentin Tarantino's character. Brad Pitt is still playing the same dangerously relaxed stuntman. The difference is that 1977 Hollywood has finally discovered a profession perfectly suited to him: fixer.

By Clarel
Series

Ewan McGregor still wants more Obi-Wan, and he has already pitched Dave Filoni a Yoda story

Ewan McGregor is no longer simply waiting for Lucasfilm to send him an Obi-Wan Kenobi script. Four years after the Disney+ limited series, he is coming up with possible stories himself. One of them would send Obi-Wan looking for Yoda after the Jedi Order's collapse. The important part is what has not happened: Lucasfilm has not put that project into announced development.

By Tori
Cinema

Adèle Exarchopoulos lives through eight years of alcoholism in Jeanne Herry's Garance

Garance is not introduced as a celebrity or as someone whose life has already collapsed. She works, moves apartments, falls in love, goes out and keeps functioning. Alcohol is simply always there — first as comfort and social fuel, then increasingly as something that reorganizes the rest of her life. Jeanne Herry follows that process across eight years in Garance.

By Yasmine
Cinema

Nicolas Winding Refn returns to theaters after 10 years with Her Private Hell

Nicolas Winding Refn has not made a theatrical feature since The Neon Demon in 2016, and Her Private Hell is not exactly a restrained return. The new film mixes science fiction, horror, serial-killer imagery, paternal anxiety and aggressively colored neon inside a futuristic city swallowed by a deadly mist.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sense and Sensibility returns to theaters with the Dashwood sisters taking priority over their suitors

Any new Sense and Sensibility has to share the room with Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's 1995 film. Georgia Oakley is not pretending otherwise. Her version finds its distinction by moving away from the simplest reading of one sensible sister and one emotional sister, instead treating Elinor and Marianne as two young women whose survival depends on learning from each other.

By Clarel
Cinema

Robert Pattinson turns To Catch a Predator into a thriller as Primetime reaches theaters

To Catch a Predator already had the structure of a thriller: hidden cameras, a trap, an unexpected confrontation and an arrest waiting outside. Primetime is interested in what happened when that structure became entertainment. Lance Oppenheim's first narrative feature stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and opens in French theaters on September 23.

By Clarel
Cinema

Jacob Elordi could join Scarlett Johansson in Ari Aster's Scapegoat

Ari Aster has once again reached the stage where his cast is news before anyone knows what the movie is actually about. Scarlett Johansson is already attached to Scapegoat, and Jacob Elordi is now in negotiations to join her. His deal is not yet closed, while Aster is keeping the story almost completely secret.

By Tori
Cinema

Evan Rachel Wood wanted to return for Practical Magic 2, but Joey King inherited her role

Practical Magic 2 brings back Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing nearly three decades after the original. Evan Rachel Wood would have happily joined that reunion. The actress, who played Kylie Owens as a child in 1998, says she offered to return and was told the character was being recast with Joey King.

By Yasmine
Cinema

Barbie 2 is stuck on contracts because nobody signed up for a sequel the first time

The biggest film in Warner Bros. history has a surprisingly basic sequel problem: its key creative team was never obligated to make another one. Three years after Barbie earned more than $1.4 billion worldwide, the studio is still negotiating with Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Noah Baumbach. Those talks have stalled.

By Tori
Cinema

La Bola Negra wins Toronto's audience prize after already taking Best Director at Cannes

La Bola Negra left Cannes with a directing prize. Four months later, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have collected a very different signal from Toronto: audiences chose their film as TIFF's 2026 People's Choice Award winner. That matters not because it guarantees anything ahead, but because few festival prizes are watched as closely once awards season begins.

By Tori
Cinema

Resident Evil opens to $60 million as Zach Cregger obliterates the franchise record

Sony was already expecting a franchise record. The final estimate is much larger than that modest description suggests. Resident Evil has opened to roughly $60 million in the U.S. and Canada, compared with the $26.65 million record set by Afterlife in 2010, while giving Zach Cregger the biggest opening of his career.

By Tori
Cinema

Spider-Man: Brand New Day knocks Star Wars off the top with a record $936.8 million domestic run

A box-office record that survived for more than a decade has finally moved. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has crossed roughly $936.8 million in the United States and Canada, edging past Star Wars: The Force Awakens after only 47 days in theaters. It is an unadjusted record, but within the industry's standard nominal chart, Spider-Man now sits alone at number one.

By Tori
Cinema

The Inbetweeners 3 is actually filming, and all four disasters are back 16 years later

For years, another Inbetweeners movie sounded like a reunion everyone could imagine and nobody quite knew how to make. The cast could not plausibly go back to sixth form forever. Netflix has now found the simpler answer: let them grow up. Production on The Inbetweeners 3 is officially underway in the UK with the entire original quartet.

By Clarel
Cinema

Best of the Best turns collegiate Bollywood dance into a combat sport for Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

Maya and Anjali think they are joining a college dance team. What they actually enter is a world of late-night rehearsals, bruising competition, creative obsession and enough internal drama to make class feel like the relaxing part of university. Best of the Best arrives on Netflix September 18 with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia leading a coming-of-age comedy built around collegiate Bollywood fusion.

By Yasmine
Cinema

Prime Video turns a million-book French romance into a global YA movie with You+Me

Prime Video does not have to introduce Alma and Vadim from nothing. Emma Green's Toi+Moi – Seuls contre tous trilogy has already sold close to one million copies in France. The movie arriving September 18 turns that established French readership into a much larger experiment: can a local YA romance travel globally with Vittoria Di Savoia and Lucas Barski in the lead?

By Tori
Cinema

Resident Evil is back in theaters, but Zach Cregger finally leaves the game heroes alone

Resident Evil cinema has already tried radical reinvention and a more literal return to the games. Zach Cregger is attempting a third route. His new film opens September 18 with Raccoon City intact but Leon, Claire, Jill and Chris nowhere near the lead role. Instead, Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier having an exceptionally bad night.

By Vever
Cinema

Guru takes away John Abraham's most reliable weapon: knowing what is real

John Abraham usually plays characters who can identify the threat in front of them. Guru is giving him something less convenient. Principal photography has started on Ribhu Dasgupta's psychological thriller, where the central problem is not simply an enemy but a protagonist who can no longer trust his own memory.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sense and Sensibility shifts the focus: this time the Dashwood sisters come before their suitors

Sense and Sensibility has no shortage of romantic complications, eligible men and financial consequences attached to marriage. Georgia Oakley's new adaptation is nevertheless putting a different relationship first. Following its London premiere, the film is presenting Elinor and Marianne less as competing philosophies and more as sisters whose contrasting instincts gradually reshape each other.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sunrise on the Reaping puts 48 tributes in the arena and shows exactly what broke Haymitch

The arena is covered in flowers. Mountains rise behind it, sunlight fills the valley and everything looks almost absurdly beautiful. Then the Capitol sends 48 teenagers inside. The latest Sunrise on the Reaping trailer is leaning hard into that contradiction as Haymitch Abernathy enters the most notorious Hunger Games of his generation.

By Clarel
Cinema

Hawaii Five-O is taking another shot at the big screen with Destin Daniel Cretton

Hawaii Five-O has spent decades trying to make the jump from television to theaters. Paramount is now assembling another attempt around Destin Daniel Cretton, although this one still comes with a significant caveat: the deal is not fully closed and the studio has yet to announce a cast, production date or release window.

By Tori
Cinema Review 7/10

Pressure — Andrew Scott turns the D-Day forecast into a gripping war-room thriller

Pressure finds a remarkably fresh angle on D-Day: weather charts, scientific disagreement and a handful of hours in which one bad forecast could kill thousands. Andrew Scott carries that tension brilliantly, even if the film's stage origins remain visible and Brendan Fraser proves more divisive.

By Clarel
Cinema Review 6/10

Les Héros du Louvre: a remarkable true story shaken almost to exhaustion

Élie Chouraqui turns his grandfather's story into a drama about transmission, a Jewish family facing the Occupation and the people who protected the Louvre's treasures. Kad Merad and Marie Gillain give the film genuine warmth, but relentlessly agitated camerawork and overly insistent writing too often prevent an extraordinary story from breathing.

By Clarel
Pop Culture

Liam Neeson and Stella Stocker held hands at TIFF — that still does not make them an official couple

Celebrity gossip rarely needs a press release when it has a hand to photograph. Liam Neeson and Stella Stocker arrived at TIFF together, dressed in coordinated black and holding hands on the red carpet. That part is straightforward. The part where they have therefore become Hollywood's newest couple is still being supplied by everyone except Neeson and Stocker.

By Vever
Cinema

Godzilla Minus Zero's new trailer returns to the wounds Minus One never really closed

Godzilla Minus One made its monster terrifying partly by giving viewers something worth destroying first. The full theatrical trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero suggests Takashi Yamazaki has not forgotten that lesson. The sequel is larger, its response operation is more organized and Godzilla looks considerably harder to kill, but the film is still beginning with people who had only just convinced themselves life could become normal again.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sebastian Stan invokes The Godfather Part II while keeping his Batman role firmly secret

Sebastian Stan says he does not want to inflate expectations for The Batman: Part II. His chosen method was to walk onto Matt Reeves' set and occasionally feel as though he might be making The Godfather Part II. It is an absurdly effective way to accomplish the opposite, but underneath the enormous comparison is a more useful observation: everyone involved appears acutely aware that this sequel has six years of expectation to justify.

By Clarel
Cinema

Hope goes global after smashing a Korean presales record

Hope was never built to remain a Korean festival success. After Cannes, a record international presales run and one of South Korea's biggest theatrical launches of 2026, Na Hong-jin's first film in a decade is now being pushed overseas with the release strategy of a genuine global blockbuster.

By Tori
Cinema

Hope already has a sequel script — Na Hong-jin is betting big on Korea's $74 million sci-fi gamble

Na Hong-jin did not wait for Hope to finish its global theatrical run before thinking about what comes next. He has already written a follow-up story, with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander's extraterrestrial characters positioned for a larger role. The script exists. The green light does not — and that distinction matters for one of the most expensive films South Korea has ever produced.

By Tori
Cinema

Spider-Man 5 Can Wait: Even After $2.4 Billion, Sony Still Refuses to Set a Date

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has made more than $2.4 billion worldwide. The obvious studio response would be to date the next movie before the current one has even left theaters. Sony is doing something more unusual: admitting that it still does not know when Tom Holland's Spider-Man will return.

By Tori
Cinema Review 6/10

Supergirl Review: Milly Alcock Finds Kara Zor-El, Even When the Movie Loses Altitude

Now streaming on HBO Max, Supergirl has a far more compelling heroine than the movie surrounding her. Milly Alcock gives Kara bruised humor and real emotional weight, but Craig Gillespie's space adventure is held back by muddy action, a thin villain and a screenplay that too often reduces promising ideas to shortcuts.

By Clarel
Cinema

Netflix is finally going to show its box-office numbers

Netflix has spent years releasing movies in theaters while keeping one of the theater business's most basic numbers to itself. That exception is beginning to disappear. Starting with La Bola Negra, the streamer reportedly intends to disclose grosses for a selected group of theatrical releases.

By Tori
Cinema

The Odyssey passes $1 billion overseas as Nolan’s epic keeps sailing

The Odyssey has now made more than $1 billion without counting North America. For a nearly three-hour Homer adaptation without a sequel number, superhero logo or decades-old movie franchise attached to the title, that is an unusual box-office milestone.

By Tori
Cinema

The US box office just delivered a record $4.76 billion summer

Hollywood finally has a post-pandemic milestone that does not require the phrase “best since 2019.” Domestic summer ticket sales reached roughly $4.76 billion between May 1 and Labor Day, narrowly surpassing the previous nominal record set in 2013.

By Tori
Cinema

The Weight brings Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe into a gold-smuggling nightmare

A prison camp, a desperate father and enough gold to make every man in the wilderness suspicious of the person walking beside him. The Weight has a deliberately old-fashioned setup, and Padraic McKinley seems perfectly happy with that. The Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe thriller is now screening at Deauville ahead of its September theatrical release.

By Clarel
Cinema

Lincoln in the Bardo gives Meryl Streep four roles, not one

The new Lincoln in the Bardo casting announcement is less interesting as a list of famous names than as a clue to how Duke Johnson plans to handle George Saunders' crowded afterlife. Meryl Streep alone will voice four characters, while Bill Hader and Tom Waits each take multiple parts.

By Clarel
Series

HBO Max is expanding in Japan without launching another standalone app

HBO Max is expanding its presence in Japan, but Warner Bros. Discovery is not asking viewers to install another streaming app. It has chosen two established gateways instead: Hulu Japan and Prime Video. The distribution strategy may be as important as the content arriving with it.

By Tori
Cinema Review 8/10

Toy Story 5 review: Jessie gives Pixar's oldest franchise a reason to keep playing

Pixar sends its toys through the fear of obsolescence for a fifth time, but Jessie and Lilypad give that familiar anxiety a genuinely contemporary shape. Toy Story 5 still carries visible franchise baggage, yet its best scenes recover the emotional precision and visual invention that made the series endure.

By Clarel
Cinema

The Mosquito Bowl turns a real 1944 football game into Peter Berg’s next war film

On Christmas Eve 1944, 65 Marines played football on Guadalcanal while preparing for a campaign that would take them to Okinawa. Fifteen of those players would be killed there months later. Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl is built around the uncomfortable distance between those two events, and Netflix has now released its first proper look at the film.

By Clarel
Cinema

Marvel’s Doomsday podcast turns five old MCU movies into an official refresher course

The MCU has accumulated enough movies and Disney+ shows to make “what should I watch first?” a genuine logistical question. Marvel’s new Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday Official Podcast answers it with an unexpectedly small syllabus: five films, one episode per week and a straight line from the original Avengers team to Endgame.

By Vever
Cinema Review 9/10

The Odyssey review: Nolan makes Odysseus’ homecoming physical, haunted and enormous

Christopher Nolan turns Homer into a 172-minute IMAX blockbuster without sanding away the voyage’s brutality. Matt Damon plays a less sensual and more guilt-ridden Odysseus than Homer’s trickster, anchoring a visually extraordinary adaptation whose liberties with the poem are also among its limitations.

By Clarel
Cinema

Toy Story 5 heads to Disney+ on September 23 after crossing $1 billion

Toy Story 5 is moving to Disney+ after already proving that audiences were still willing to leave the house for Woody and Buzz. Disney has set a September 23 streaming date for the Pixar sequel, which opened in theaters on June 19 and has since passed $1 billion worldwide.

By Tori
Cinema

The Odyssey Has Become IMAX's Biggest Movie Ever

For The Odyssey, IMAX was never an optional premium badge added at release. It was part of the production, the marketing and even the advance-ticket strategy. Four weekends were enough for that approach to produce the biggest global gross in IMAX history.

By Tori
Cinema

Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter Became More Than a Cult Character

A famous performance can survive inside a movie. Frank-N-Furter escaped his. Fifty years of costumes, midnight screenings, callbacks and shadow casts turned Tim Curry's role into something audiences repeatedly perform for themselves.

By Vever
Cinema Review 8/10

Spider-Man: Brand New Day: Peter Parker finally grows up, the MCU much less so

Destin Daniel Cretton brings Spider-Man back to New York, loneliness and a body that is itself becoming unsettling. Tom Holland and Zendaya give the film genuine maturity, while more physical action reminds us why the character still works. The trouble begins when this intimate crisis once again has to prepare Marvel's next chapters.

Cinema

Disney+ Is Turning September 2 Into a Mandalorian Event

The Mandalorian and Grogu is heading home after its theatrical run, and Disney+ is giving the movie more than a standard catalog launch. September 2 will bring three separate releases built around Din Djarin and Grogu.

By Tori
Cinema

Cristian Mungiu has won Cannes twice, but the nineteen years between his Palmes tell the better story

Cristian Mungiu did not spend nineteen years trying to recreate the movie that won him Cannes. That may be the most useful way to read his second Palme d'Or. Fjord, a 146-minute drama set in Norway, looks geographically far removed from the Romanian story that gave him his first victory in 2007. Cannes has nevertheless kept finding reasons to reward the films between them.

By Clarel
Cinema

Eye Haïdara opened Cannes by asking what cinema is willing to look at

Cannes opening ceremonies are built to celebrate cinema. Eye Haïdara made the phrase slightly less comfortable on May 12. Before the jury, before Peter Jackson's Honorary Palme and before the opening film, she addressed people trying to resist and moved quickly to filmmakers who choose to point a camera toward things others would rather leave unseen.

By Vever
Cinema

Cannes opened with one premiere in the Lumière and more than 980 screenings across France

A Cannes opening film normally creates scarcity. A few thousand people see it first, photographs travel everywhere, and the wider audience waits for distribution to catch up. The Electric Kiss did almost the opposite on May 12. As Pierre Salvadori's film premiered inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, French theaters were already screening the same opening-night program across the country.

By Tori
Cinema

Peter Jackson's Honorary Palme d'Or began with a 26-minute gamble at Cannes in 2001

Peter Jackson's most important Cannes screening may still be one that did not contain a complete movie. On May 13, 2001, seven months before The Fellowship of the Ring opened, Jackson brought 26 minutes of unfinished footage to the Croisette. On May 12, 2026, he returned to Cannes and accepted an Honorary Palme d'Or from Elijah Wood.

By Clarel
Cinema

Sylvester Stallone and Peter Farrelly remember the approval of I Play Rocky very differently

The awkward question around I Play Rocky is no longer whether Sylvester Stallone is officially making the movie. He isn't credited as its writer, director or producer in Amazon MGM's current materials. The stranger question is much smaller: did Stallone know Peter Farrelly was going to make it? Stallone and Farrelly have now supplied answers that do not fit comfortably together.

By Tori
Cinema

I Play Rocky is taking the underdog story to TIFF before its November release

Peter Farrelly has a very specific piece of history with Toronto. In 2018, Green Book arrived at TIFF for its world premiere, won the audience award and left with an entirely different place in that year's awards conversation. I Play Rocky will enter the same festival on September 12. That history makes the booking easy to notice. It does not make the outcome repeatable.

By Tori
Cinema

Camp Rock 3 hits Disney+ with a new class and plenty of old DNA

Camp Rock 3 is now streaming on Disney+. Its August 14 arrival turns one of Disney Channel's most recognizable 2000s properties into something more useful than a nostalgia special: a launchpad for another generation of performers.

By Tori
Cinema

Sebastian Stan filmed Avengers: Doomsday without ever getting the whole puzzle

Sebastian Stan is definitely in Avengers: Doomsday. He is apparently a considerably less useful source on what Avengers: Doomsday actually does. Asked about the movie by Le Journal du Dimanche, Stan said he never received the full screenplay and instead shot disconnected pieces of it. For Marvel, ignorance has one extremely convenient production benefit: it is difficult to leak a plot connection nobody told you about.

By Tori
Cinema

David Harbour said the one Tony Stark line Avengers: Doomsday was supposed to keep complicated

David Harbour was offered an almost irresponsible interview prompt: give Variety one line from Avengers: Doomsday with absolutely no context. He pointed, slipped into Red Guardian's Russian accent and said, “You… are Tony Stark.” That is a magnificent spoiler if it is a spoiler. It is also an extremely efficient joke if Harbour knew exactly which four words would cause Marvel fans to dismantle the internet for parts.

By Vever
Cinema

Avengers: Doomsday finally gives its enormous crossover a center: Doctor Doom

Avengers: Doomsday has never had a shortage of superheroes. Its harder problem was making that enormous cast look like one movie rather than several reunion specials arriving at the same time. Marvel's new D23 footage offers a surprisingly straightforward answer. Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom is becoming the point around which everyone else has to move.

By Clarel
Cinema

Dune: Part Three is a thriller because Paul Atreides has already won

The obvious version of a third Dune movie would simply make Part Two larger. More armies, more sandworms, a wider war and another enemy waiting at the end. Denis Villeneuve has spent a decade making these films and seems considerably less interested in the obvious version. His final chapter is a thriller, and the reason is built into Paul Atreides' new position: there is almost nothing left for him to conquer.

By Clarel
Cinema

Dune: Part Three is changing how Arrakis is photographed without abandoning digital

Dune already had one of the more unusual image pipelines in blockbuster filmmaking. Denis Villeneuve has decided that two movies were enough reason to change it. Part Three introduces Linus Sandgren, real 65mm acquisition and IMAX film cameras to the franchise, but stops short of turning film stock into a rule. Arrakis itself remains digital.

By Clarel
Cinema

Dune: Part Three turned an IMAX ticket drop into a stress test for AMC

The most revealing number from Dune: Part Three's August ticket drop is not a box-office total. There isn't one yet. It is three. AMC CEO Adam Aron says traffic across the chain's website and app reached roughly three times the level seen when Spider-Man: Brand New Day tickets launched, enough to slow and glitch the company's systems while fans competed for December IMAX seats.

By Tori
Cinema

Brad Pitt let the dog lead on Heart of the Beast

David Ayer did not want Heart of the Beast to look like Brad Pitt performing beside a well-trained prop. Odin had to feel like somebody James Belmont had survived with long before the audience met either of them. That meant giving the role to a real working dog, then accepting one inconvenient fact of animal filmmaking: the dog gets a vote.

By Clarel
Cinema

The Unknown gives Arthur Harari a deceptively simple body-swap problem

Arthur Harari has spent the years since Onoda becoming an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but his return to directing is not exactly modest. The Unknown takes a familiar body-swap device, strips away the comic instruction manual and asks Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider to make an impossible change feel physically credible for 140 minutes.

By Clarel
Cinema

Fjord no longer needs a country to open its International Feature Oscar path

For years, the International Feature race contained an unusually powerful gatekeeper: the national selection committee. The 99th Academy Awards loosen that structure. A small group of major festival winners can now reach the submission process through their awards, and Cannes champion Fjord is one of the first films positioned to use the change.

By Tori
Cinema

Cannes winner Fjord is now in French theaters, and its conflict starts at home

A Palme d'Or can make a film sound like homework before anyone has bought a ticket. Fjord has a much more immediate setup than that reputation suggests. Released in France on August 19, Cristian Mungiu's new film starts with two neighboring families in Norway and turns a child's bruises into a conflict that quickly reaches the school, the wider community and child-protection authorities.

By Clarel
Cinema

Matthew McConaughey discovered a bee allergy just before filming a movie full of real bees

The production problem arrived before the cameras properly got going. Matthew McConaughey was preparing to play an Oklahoma beekeeper when an actual bee sting revealed that he was allergic. Andrew Patterson's movie was still built around real hives, real beekeeping and one shot involving thousands of bees gathering on its leading man's arm.

By Clarel
Cinema

The Odyssey is now Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie, and Batman has lost its record

Christopher Nolan set his previous worldwide record with Batman. He has now beaten it with Homer. Universal officially confirmed on August 10 that The Odyssey had become the highest-grossing film of the director’s career, and the theatrical run did not stop at that milestone: one week later, worldwide estimates were already around $1.29 billion.

By Tori