‘Land Of Bad’ Sees Action; Oscar Nominated Shorts’ Long Game; ‘God & Country’ Enters Political Fray & ‘The Zone Of Interest’ Wins 3 BAFTAs – Specialty Box Office

Will Hollywood experience another actors strike in the coming months?

EXCLUSIVE: Boxing great and entrepreneur Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will serve as an executive producer on the film, The Long Game, which earned the SXSW Narrative Spotlight Audience Award in 2023. The feature, directed by Julio Quintana, opens in theaters nationwide on April 12.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If the Academy judged features by the same standards that they do live action shorts, the best picture ballot would be full of starry, quasi-political issue movies: well-meaning but manipulative films like “Father Stu” and “The Janes.” In this category, it’s the message that matters to Oscar voters, which makes this year’s “2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action” program (available in theaters and on demand from ShortsTV) one of the most frustrating lineups in recent memory. Or it would, if not for the presence of one genuinely brilliant, liberatingly unserious nominee among them.

Julio Torres’s directorial debut Problemista from A24 posted the highest per-screen average of the weekend with a solid limited opening, grossing $140.9k on five screens in New York and LA with multiple sold out Q&As.

Jaden Thompson The Oscars can always be counted on to prompt discourse. From “Barbie” snubs to racial diversity to a certain on-stage slap, the prestigious awards ceremony often serves as the impetus for societal debates. This year, Good Energy and Colby College are hoping to spark conversations about the representation of climate change on screen, with the invention of the “Climate Reality Check,” an evaluation modeled after the Bechdel-Wallace Test measuring female representation on screen.

At their nearest point, Taiwan and mainland China are less than a hundred miles apart. But historically and politically – for over 70 years – a broad gulf has separated them. In the case of the Kinmen Islands, part of Taiwan, the paradox between geography and history is even more stark: the islands sit but a few miles from the mainland city of Xiamen, in the increasingly fraught waters of the Taiwan Strait.

If you are aiming to win your Oscar pool you may feel relatively safe right about now predicting, as most are, a sweep by Oppenheimer, especially after its overwhelming showing last week winning 7 BAFTA awards, the DGA honor for Christopher Nolan the week before that, and on Saturday sweeping 3 of the 5 movie awards at SAG and winning top prize at PGA last night. However key to actually winning your pool will not be those marquee feature film categories but rather the three for shorts that run under the radar, but can spell the difference in triumphing over all others in whatever pool you enter. So who could – or should for these purposes – prevail in the Documentary, Animated, and Live Action shorts contests this year? Shorts TV in association with distributor Magnolia Pictures has, as usual. put all of them in theatrical release in theatres across the country, so if you are lucky you could have the chance to see the three different programs offered on the big screen. Some, like MTV’s The ABC’s Of Book Banning are available for free on You Tube, and some are available on the various streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon, Apple. I have seen all 15 of the films spread across these categories with 5 nominees each. Here is my take on the artistic merits of each.

Major news today for Oscar-nominee To Kill a Tiger. Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas is joining the award-winning feature documentary as an executive producer, alongside Dev Patel, Mindy Kaling, and other bold-faced names. The news comes as Netflix inks a deal to launch the film globally on its platform soon.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Audiences will get a chance to see MTV Documentary Films‘ Oscar nominated short documentary “The ABCs of Book Banning” for free on YouTube beginning on Feb. 23 until the end of the month. The 27-minute film, about the rising tide of book banning efforts around the United States, marks docu titan Sheila Nevins‘ directorial debut.

Italy’s Best International Feature Oscar-nominated Io Capitano starts its U.S. run today in ten market on 21 screens, a bit wider than usual for Cohen Media Group but with Academy final voting just started, reviews are gold for the odyssey that director Matteo Garrone calls “a movie about human rights. About the rights of everybody to move, to look for a better life.”

It takes more than a village to make a movie. It often takes a global network of visual effects artists working alongside the on-set actors, crew, and filmmakers.

Matt Sweeney, a pioneering special effects artist who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Ron Howard’s 1995 space epic Apollo 13, died February 19 of lung cancer at Burbank’s Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center. He was 75.

The LAUSD Education Foundation is embarking on a major capital campaign to benefit the musical instrument repair operation documented in the Oscar-nominated film The Last Repair Shop.

There is a very competitive race in the Visual Effects Oscar category this year. There’s the old standby (“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”), the head-scratcher (“Napoleon”), the iconic monster (“Godzilla Minus One”), the space-faring super-hero team (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

In the opening moments of 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s chilling account of the siege of the Ukrainian port city, a Russian tank marked with the ominous ‘Z’ swivels its turret toward a hospital. On an upper floor of the building, Chernov and his small team record as the cannon slowly rotates towards them, preparing to fire.

When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, it marked a watershed moment for the Documentary Feature category. All the nominated films focused on international subjects – stories from Uganda, Tunisia, Ukraine, India and Chile — and not a single American director was recognized.

Christopher Vourlias Oscar nominee Abderrahmane Sissako (“Timbuktu”) returns to the screen for the first time in nearly a decade with his latest feature, “Black Tea,” a lushly lensed romantic drama about a love spanning cultural divides that world premieres Feb. 21 in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

The Oscar-nominated artisans from Ridley Scott‘s epic Napoleon joined me as part of Apple Original Films‘ presentations at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event. Veteran production designer Arthur Max and costume designers Janty Yates and David Crossman talked extensively about what it was like to work with Sir Ridley on the ambitious, large-scale production that saw Joaquin Phoenix play Napoleon Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby his wife Josephine.

Tomris Laffly There is a pivotal scene in Greta Gerwig’s dust-pink “Barbie” that has come to define the Oscar-nominated movie — a disarmingly truthful monologue that is not delivered by the film’s many Barbies, nor its numerous Kens. Instead, supporting actress Oscar nominee America Ferrera’s Gloria crisply sums up the movie’s themes around a picture-perfect doll confronted by the real-world, patriarchy-fueled challenges of womanhood. “You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.

Shanelle Genai “I think that the six or seven months I spent with Sofia at this time in my life — as a mother, as a wife, having felt like wanting to quit and give up — she pushed me into knowing you have everything that you need inside of you to continue this next chapter and leg in life.” This epiphany by “The Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks about the character she portrayed is just one of many powerful yet similar revelations that connect a handful of female Oscar nominees and their respective performances in movies ranging from “Nyad” to “Barbie,” “Poor Things” and “The Holdovers.” For them, stories of female self-realization that began on-screen transformed them off-screen. When Brooks got the chance to return to her role as Sofia for the movie musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” nearly 10 years after her initial Broadway debut performance, it was vastly different due to the stage of her life at the time.