Latest – Page 513
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Features
Japan - Hot projects in the pipeline
Aruitemo AruitemoDirector Hirokazu Kore-eda is no stranger to critical acclaim with films such as Nobody Knows and international arthouse hit After Life. His latest stars Hiroshi Abe (Bubble Fiction) as the good-for-nothing son of a doctor who returns home for the anniversary of his brother's death. With Kore-eda's talent for ...
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Japan - Adaptations - Tapping the sources
Books: While the manga TV animation-animated feature cycle has been a mainstay in Japan, Toho Studios' 2004 megahit Crying Out Love, In The Centre Of The World ($72.5m) sparked an increased dependence on novels as source material, with major publishers such as Kadokawa Publishing and Shueisha regularly joining production consortiums. ...
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Features
China - Onward and upward
Industry experts in China believe the country's 2007 box office could break the $400m (rmb3bn) milestone as the number of cinemas and admissions continues to grow.According to monthly statistics from the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (Sarft), total box office for the first half ...
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Bourne-again triumphs
Jason Bourne kicked the Simpsons out of the top spot as The Bourne Ultimatum took $15.2m in its third weekend - pushing it past the $50m mark. The third instalment of the franchise expanded into a further five territories, taking $2.5m in its first weekend in Russia and opening to ...
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International box office - Czech Republic - Recovery position
Admissions in the Czech Republic grew 13% year on year for the first half of 2007, with cinemas earning total revenues of nearly $31.3m (czk637m). If the trend continues, 2007 will outpace last year's 11.5 million admissions, continuing the recovery from 2005's 9.5 million.The Czech Republic, which has a population ...
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Features
United States - Planting Marigold
Since setting up its US distribution operation last year, Indian entertainment giant Adlabs has released a swathe of Bollywood pictures to US-based Indian audiences, including sci-fi box-office hit Krrish, which took $2.2m across North America.Now, the company is gearing up for its first ever release to US mainstream theatres, with ...
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Features
United States - Tales: Take two
I feel like the pilot of a 747 that's been flying through a hurricane and is finally coming in to land," Richard Kelly says of his most recent film, Southland Tales.It has been two years since Kelly began production on his labyrinthine black comedy-cum-thriller, about the Apocalypse, set in Southern ...
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Features
Taiwan - Eros as a labour of love
Lee Kang-sheng has walked the Venice red carpet three times as the leading man of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's Vive L'Amour (1994), Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) and most recently, I Don't Want To Sleep Alone (2006). This year, however, will see him there as not just an actor but as ...
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China - Felling tales in the digital age
In the winter of 2004, Yu Guangyi entered the snowy forests of Black Bear Valley to record the lives of some of China's last lumberjacks. He spent four months, shooting with a single Sony PD150, a documentary that captures the dangerous and arduous nature of their work as well as ...
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United Kingdom - British promises
Like most, if not all, successful UK producers, Paul Webster is not afraid of the US. "We're trying to work on projects with scale, so that means we need American partners," says Webster, the former Miramax head of production and Film4 chief executive who now oversees the film division of ...
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Features
Industry moves
Boltho takes on Paramount roleAlexei Boltho, former business development manager for BBC Films, has taken on a newly created acquisitions post at Paramount Pictures International (PPI). As of August 20, he will be PPI's director, co-productions and acquisitions, working out of Paramount's London headquarters and reporting to Los Angeles-based Ellen ...
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Features
Venice International Film Festival - Venice spans the generations
Marco Mueller, artistic director of the Venice international film festival, has been carving a personal stamp that becomes more defined each year.For his fourth line-up, Mueller has constructed a competition with a strong bedrock of English-language pictures from directors including Paul Haggis, Wes Anderson, Brian De Palma, Andrew Dominik, Tony ...
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Red's army on the march
It is a scorching summer day of around 36C at a tank base three hours outside Beijing. More than 1,000 actors and extras wearing ancient armour are in the midst of battle. As flags fly and war drums pound, Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai dashes among the crowds, waving ...
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Features
Analysis: International box-office - Weekend August 17-19
The Simpsons Movie barely keeps hold of the top spot for a fourth weekend, taking $22.3m from 49 territories, just beating The Bourne Ultimatum's $22.2m weekend take. The third instalment of the Bourne franchise shot up 423% this weekend after expanding in a further seven territories. The increase was catapulted ...
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Hitting the books
It used to be common to see ads that heralded a $100m gross but now that figure seems rather puny. Still, it's not that common to see a double truck for a picture that's done $500m. Certainly when you toss in ancillary revenues from cable, merchandising, soundtracks, and DVD sales ...
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In Focus - The Latest Strike News
Contract talks between Hollywood writers and their studio employers got off to a testy start last month: Writers Guild of America (WGA) reps dismissed a proposal by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (Amptp) for a study of the residuals paid in new media markets - perhaps the ...
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United States - Freedom of the pen
When series regular Steve Kloves ducked out of writing the fifth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, producer David Heyman turned to Michael Goldenberg. Goldenberg is no stranger to challenging adaptations, with Contact and Peter Pan among his credits. He immediately felt he had a ...
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Features
United Arab Emirates - Gulf of opportunity
Jon Fitzgerald's career has taken him from Park City to Santa Barbara via the Bahamas and Florida - and now to the Gulf, where he has been appointed director of Abu Dhabi's inaugural Middle East International Film Festival (Meiff).Invited by the Abu Dhabi Film Commission's Abed Awad, Fitzgerald was initially ...
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Finland - The war zone
Marko Makilaakso is a tenacious film-maker. When film school turned him down, he started making his own short films and music videos, eventually establishing an award-winning career.A few years later, when the Finnish Film Foundation refused to fund his debut feature on the grounds it was a horror film, Makilaakso ...
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United Kingdom - East meets west
A chance meeting on holiday set Donal Fernandes on the previously untrodden Estonian route to Cannes.The first-time producer was on a trip to the Eastern European country when he bumped into local film-maker Kadri Kousaar, who was struggling to produce her first feature, Magnus.He had previously met her in 2006 ...