War Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Labour are no longer in control of West Dunbartonshire Council, with two former party members accused of putting “personal advancement above the greater good.”

Variety had with multiple top sales agencies, a common silver lining emerged: in-house production is down across the board at the legacy studios and streamers, mostly thanks to the paralytic effect of the 2023 actor-and-writer strikes. This means buyers are desperate for finished product they can offer subscribers and moviegoers.

Christopher Vourlias Not long after he’s canned from his job as an intergalactic trucker for the biggest nuclear waste disposal company in Eastern Europe, Ukrainian Everyman Andriy Melnyk is blinded by a flash of light as his clunky cargo ship hurtles across the galaxy. When he comes to, his robot assistant, Maxim, informs him that the Earth has blown up, and Andriy is the only living soul left in the universe. Just a typical day for a cosmonaut in the interstellar gig economy.

Marta Balaga Say hello to the Ukrainian family of four (Roman Lutskyi, Anastasiia Karpienko, Sofiia Berezovska, Fedir Pugachov), enjoying their Canary Islands holiday. That is, until the invasion begins and they are stuck in their nice hotel, surrounded by others who are still in the party mode. “The starting point was a newspaper article, just like with my debut ‘Bread and Salt.’ It was about Ukrainians who were surprised by the war in Madagascar,” explained director Damian Kocur, who is premiering “Under the Volcano” at Toronto.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Series and documentaries about ancient history, pop culture and current events continue to prove popular sellers for Arte Distribution, which is presenting a number of new titles at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Le Havre. “The Mystery of the Desert Kites,” which follows an international team of archaeologists exploring the heart of Saudi Arabia and the Black Desert of Jordan to find out more about the oldest megastructures in human history, just pre-sold to Australia’s SBS.

Uprising, led by Gang Dong-won (Peninsula, Broker) and Park Jeong-min (The 8 Show). Read on for everything you need to know about the upcoming movie.Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, Uprising follows the journey and conflict between two childhood companions – a master and servant – who face one another on opposite sides of a war as adults.While Netflix has yet to reveal the names of its characters, Park Jeong-min will star as the master and Gang Dong-won the servant.Others starring in Uprising include Hellbound breakout star Kim Shin-rock, Jin Sun-kyu (The Uncanny Counter), Jung Sung-il (The Glory) and Cha Seung-won (One Ordinary Day, The Tyrant).Meanwhile, the film will be helmed by Decision to Leave director Park Chan-wook.Netflix has not released a trailer for Uprising at the time of publishing.

As the Toronto International Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war stole the spotlight.

Ethan Shanfeld An opening night screening at the Toronto Film Festival was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters rallying against the Royal Bank of Canada, which is the official bank partner of TIFF. The four protesters entered the Princess of Wales Theatre ahead of the 6 p.m. showing of “Nutcrackers,” a dramedy starring Ben Stiller and directed by David Gordon Green, while chanting, “RBC funds genocide,” in an apparent reference to the bank’s ties to Israel, as the country’s war with Gaza enters its 11th month.

Alex Ritman Artists4Ceasefire, the industry collective that has been pushing for an end to the current war in Gaza (and whose pin badges were worn by various attendees at this year’s Oscars ceremony), is spearheading a new initiative calling for a halt to illegal arms sales to Israel. Through a partnership with artist Shepard Fairey and several charities — including Oxfam America, ActionAid USA and War Child Alliance/Children in Conflict — the group has launched a call to action bearing the message “Ceasefire Now, Stop Weapons, Save Lives” that urges the halt to what it says are “weapons transfers that violate U.S.

Christopher Vourlias When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in the early hours of Feb. 24, 2022, documentary filmmaker Olha Zhurba was seized by an “apocalyptic feeling” that life as she knew it had come to an end.

The War On Drugs have announced a new live album, ‘Live Drugs Again’ – find out more below.Yesterday (September 4), the band took to social media to announce the live record, which is due for release on September 13. The album will be available on streaming platforms, as well as on 2x LP.

A businessman who claimed he 'found himself in the middle' of a riot in Bolton held his head in his hands as he was locked up.

Cameras caught the Skarsgard brothers sharing a hug last night!

Ethan Shanfeld More live drugs! The War on Drugs has announced a second live album, titled “Live Drugs Again,” out Sept. 13 via Super High Quality Records.

Natasha Rothwell is turning “Who TF Did I Marry?” into a TV show.

Michael Nordine Every American soldier has left Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean Afghanistan has left them. Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen’s heartfelt documentary gives new meaning to the term “forever war” by showing the lasting impact that multiple deployments have had on a trio of Navy SEALs still struggling to truly come home years after retiring from the military.

Kate Winslet and Alexander Skarsgard have arrived in London, England to promote their new movie Lee.

The sticky issue of unsightly chewing gum lodged on Bury’s pavements is to be dealt with by the purchase of an ‘eco gum clean-up truck’. A grant from the chewing gum task force, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, will help the council clean up gum.

Siddhant Adlakha “Why War” is both the title of Amos Gitai‘s latest and a question that has long been on the director’s mind — one he has tried to answer with works like “A Letter to a Friend in Gaza” and “West of the Jordan River.” However, this seemingly direct confrontation of the query takes a roundabout path, resulting in a movie about helplessness, frustration and intellectual debate in the face of military conflict. It is based, in part, on written correspondences between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and takes an experimental, meta-fictional form, though its images can’t help but feel trepidatious, if not entirely without purpose.

EXCLUSIVE: After last year’s October 7 attacks in Israel, local director Dani Rosenberg struggled to make sense of the horrors of the massacre and the ensuing war that would unleash what he describes as “unimaginable suffering, defying comprehension.” Feeling helpless, he decided to throw himself into what he knew best – filmmaking – and began asking himself the daunting question of whether or not these events could be represented or depicted on screen. 

The BFI’s London Film Festival has set an impressive lineup of starry names including Academy Award winners Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve, Lupita Nyong’o, and recent Palme d’Or winner Sean Baker for this year’s screen talk Q&A sessions. Scroll down for the entire screen talks programme. 

The setting for Maura Delpero’s second feature is a sleepy wartime village in the Italian Alps, but the languid nature of the film is so soporific it borders on anesthetizing; indeed when the credits finally roll, it might be worth checking yourself for scars and other signs of organ harvesting. Technically, it is a marvel of period filmmaking, an immersive view of la vida rustica so bursting with authenticity that it may inspire more enthusiastic viewers to put on a folk hat and get a job in a heritage museum working the spinning jenny. Others may not be so gripped by its drawn-out drama; box-office blockbuster material it is not.

Hollywood legend Harrison Ford delighted staff at a restaurant nestled in the small village of Balintore, near Tain in the Highlands, over the weekend.

Alex Ritman Asif Kapadia sees a future vision of the world where “chairwoman” Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year as leader of a nightmarish fascist police state that was once America, a land mostly reduced to rubble following an unknown “catastrophe” that occurred in 2036. “It’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not a joke,” says the British filmmaker of mentioning Donald Trump’s daughter in “2073,” his chilling docudrama about the dystopia humanity is potentially hurtling towards and the very real and very contemporary factors concerning politics, the environment, corruption, race and technology that he says are propelling us in that direction.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Characters die in movies every day. Whether you’re watching a violent thriller or a death-bed tearjerker like “Steel Magnolias” or some of the more macabre meditations of Ingmar Bergman, you might say that the movies, in some grand collective way, are nothing less than a rehearsal for death. Yet it’s still rare to encounter a big-screen drama that grabs death by the horns, that looks it in the eye, that asks us to confront its daunting reality on every level the way Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving “The Room Next Door” does.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the topic of a new feature documentary, “The Bibi Files” produced by Oscar winner Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom. The two-hour docu, which will screen as work-in-progress at the Toronto Film Intl. Festival, features never-before-seen police interrogation footage of Netanyahu.

EXCLUSIVE: Russian atrocities in Ukraine have been powerfully documented in a range of nonfiction films – among them, 20 Days in Mariupol, Freedom on Fire, The Cranes Call, and the short documentary Bucha 22. But one stunning dimension of Russia’s brutal war of conquest has received comparatively scant attention: the Kremlin scheme to abduct thousands of Ukrainian children and deport them to Russia. A new feature documentary directed and produced by Sarah McCarthy at last puts the focus on that shocking reality.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent French-American actor and director Julie Delpy has tackled culture clash in comedies before in ”Two Days in Paris” and “Two Days in New York,” but it’s never been as poignant as in “Meet the Barbarians,” where she explores the journey of a Syrian family who find refuge in a village in Northern France. The movie, which marks Delpy’s feature comeback after helming the Netflix series “On the Verge,” is set in Paimpont, a small town in France’s Brittany region that is preparing to welcome Ukrainian refugees. But instead of Ukrainians, Syrian refugees settle in town, causing some tension among locals and testing their liberal beliefs.

Ellise Shafer Brady Corbet‘s historical drama “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, wowed Venice Film Festival on Sunday with a 12-minute standing ovation. “The Brutalist” follows 30 years in the life of László Tóth (Brody), a “Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survived the Holocaust,” according to its synopsis. “After the end of World War II, he emigrated to the United States with his wife, Erzsébet (Jones), to experience the American dream.

Disney is debuting something special for Star Wars fans.

The battleground in veteran Italian director Gianni Amelio’s atmospheric feature is nominally Europe in the last furlong of the 1914-18 conflict, but the real subject is the war that the Italian government declared on its own people. There are aspects of this all-too-true story, based loosely on Carlo Patriarca’s 2020 novel The Challenge, that will resonate throughout the world, and one might think that post-Vietnam America would be especially receptive to a story about the callous deployment of young, blue-collar men into savage conflicts from which they will almost certainly never return. Amelio’s film, however, while perfect for the local market, isn’t exactly likely to cross over.

The stars of The Order are hitting the red carpet!

Andrés Buenahora editor Jennifer Hale has been a fumbling alien, a screaming six-year-old and a superhero who saves the world. The voice actor, whose work in animation and video games includes “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” “Baldur’s Gate,” “X-Men ’97” and countless more, is one of the most recognizable voices in video games. Currently, the gaming industry is at a halt after SAG-AFTRA called a strike against the major video game publishers on July 25.

Alex Ritman Israeli director Amos Gitai has pushed back against efforts for his Venice-bowing film “Why War” to be boycotted from the festival. Premiering out of the competition over the weekend, the film takes its cue from correspondence in the early 1930s between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as they attempted to answer questions relating to the human race’s bellicose nature and how to avoid war.

Jude Law said that his new crime thriller, “The Order,” about the FBI investigation of a Neo-Nazi terrorist group in the ’80s, “needed to be made now.” At a Venice Film Festival press conference, Law spoke about the importance of the film at a time when far-right ideologies are rising again. “Sadly, the relevance speaks for itself,” he continued. “It felt like a piece of work that needed to be made now.

Israeli director Amos Gitai has batted back calls for a boycott of his Venice work Why War and said both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict need to clean out their current leaderships for peace to prevail.