“Everybody Needs A Good Ending”: Poignant Story Of Father-Son Artists Told In Oscar Contender ‘Our Time Machine’

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit.

Final exams have rarely taken a heavier toll than they do in Better Days, an arresting teen-oriented story that cranks Chinese scholastic competitiveness into the realm of murderous melodrama.

Celebrated for his 2000 film The Great Dance, South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster found himself, a decade later, exhausted from the pressures of trying to survive as a documentarian. Feeling a sense of detachment from the outside world as well as the people closest to him, Foster attempted to rekindle his passion for life by free-diving in the freezing temps of the Atlantic, vowing to do so every day for a year.

EXCLUSIVE:  Ludi Lin is set to join The CW’s forthcoming reboot of the classic series Kung Fu. 

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired the U.S. distribution rights for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin, Tunisia’s short-listed entry for Best International Film for the 93rd Academy Awards.

The Kenyan film Softie is gaining momentum as documentary features make their closing arguments for inclusion on the Oscar shortlist, with preliminary voting set to wrap up Friday. The film was nominated Tuesday for a Producers Guild Award, honoring the work of director-producer Sam Soko and producer Toni Kamau.

Also Read: What Will Make the Oscar Shortlists in Documentary and International Categories?Those gatherings were among the many specific facets of Tan’s family life that would shape her first two novels, “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” and the film takes us through the clashes that Tan and her mother had for decades before Amy was able to make peace by sitting her mother down and asking her questions about her life back in China.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorVariety’s Peter Debruge called ‘A Sun’ a “world cinema stunner” in his review of Chung Mong-Hong’s drama, and it was also hailed as one of the best movies of 2020 in his year-end roundup.The film has now been named by Taiwan as its contender for the best international feature film section at the Academy Awards.

Of the 238 feature documentaries to qualify for Oscar consideration this year, two of the most acclaimed contenders come from Romania—an impressive achievement for the Eastern European nation.

In a year of pandemic, social unrest and political polarization, one Oscar-contending documentary arrived to lift people’s spirits, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefBig name Hollywood executives and talent including Sam Raimi, Gianni Nunnari, Patrick Wachsberger and Paula Wagner have joined the “Stars Collective” diversity program launched by Chinese film financier Starlight Media.

direct to your inboxIt is unlikely to compete with the beautiful borders of the Paradise Garden or the Chinese inspired oasis of plants created around a stream.Its entrances are sealed with concrete and the once secret inner-workings dark, silent, and deserted.Yet, tucked away in a far corner of the RHS Bridgewater site in Worsley, a relic from the Cold War may one day blossom into a protected Ancient Monument.It is now camouflaged by graffiti as well as foliage, and has been a destination for

Irish actress Clare Dunne stars in Herself, a harrowing drama about a single mother who, after escaping an abusive partner, aims to rebuild her life in a unique manner. After months of struggling with the welfare and housing systems, she comes upon the idea of self-building an affordable home and, with the help of friends and neighbors, rebuilds her life and theirs from the ground up.

It took seven years for a sequel to come to fruition from DreamWorks Animation for its 2013 hit The Croods, but as it turns out the timing was just right. The coronavirus pandemic not only impacted the production process for the follow-up The Croods: A New Age, it also actually wound up giving it more gravitas and relevance.

Starring newcomer Sidney Flanigan, Eliza Hittman’s film Never Rarely Sometimes Always tells the harrowing story of a young woman who must travel from Pennsylvania to New York City in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

Manori Ravindran International EditorGreek filmmaker Christos Nikou marks his directorial debut with “Apples,” an accidentally timely pandemic movie that captured imaginations at the Venice Film Festival, where it opened the respected Orrizonti section, and has since gone on to represent Greece in the international feature film Oscar race.The film wasn’t actually shot during the COVID-19 crisis, but follows a man (Aris Servetalis) struggling to recover his memory amid a pandemic that causes

After publishing his book The Torture Letters in January of 2020, Laurence Ralph decided to adapt it into an animated short—reckoning in both cases with systemic racism in America, in hopes that society at large will address it, and take meaningful action to stop the violence it perpetuates.

Jessica Kiang A sport as quickfire as indoor volleyball deserves a nimbler workout than it gets in “Leap,” Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s lavish but curiously low-boil based-in-truth sports movie. Telling the decades-spanning tale of the Chinese Women’s Volleyball team and its star-player-turned-head-coach, Lang Ping, it’s essentially a rise-and-fall-and-rise-again story.