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Chicago, Il – – Asian Pop-Up Cinema: Season 13 will present 30 films at an in-person and drive-in festival, with select titles available for online streaming. The festival opens September 15 and runs through October 12, 2021, at AMC River East 21, The Davis Theater and ChiTown Drive-In.

The programming celebrates the best Asian-centric cinema, with new work made by filmmakers from China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.S. and Canada. This season will highlight women in film, stories with humanitarian themes and action thrillers, including four restored martial arts classics.

Season 13 opens with Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension, a documentary observing China’s growing class divide through labor, consumerism, and wealth. Structured in three parts, the film ascends through the levels of the capitalist structure and examines how the contemporary “Chinese Dream” remains an elusive fantasy for most.

Centerpiece film The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’T Kill is Japanese director Kan Eguchi’s action/comedy follow-up to The Fable,...

Veteran actor Jean Reno has been tapped to star in “Rogue City,” a thriller that sees director Olivier Marchal re-team with French studio Gaumont.

Budgeted at $13 million, the film is set in Marseille and follows an anti-gang cop (Reno) with unorthodox methods who investigates a shooting at a local nightclub along with his longtime rival.

Lannick Gautry, Stanislas Merhar and David Belle complete the cast. Alain Figlarz, who has previously worked on “Taken 3,” “The Bourne Identity” and “The Transporter,” will be handling the action scenes and stunts.

The movie is set to start shooting on location in the south of France in September. Gaumont will kick off pre-sales for “Rogue City” at Cannes with a fully story-boarded script, and expects to release “Rogue City” in France during the second quarter of 2020.

Marchal is himself a former cop who worked for both the police and French intelligence. Through films such...

Exclusive: French Riviera-set ensemble romantic comedy to co-star Adèle Haenel, Audrey Tautou, Vincent Elbaz and Damien Bonnard.

MK2 has acquired worldwide rights to Pierre Salvadori’s ensemble romantic comedy The Trouble With You revolving around a police officer who finds out that her late police chief husband was corrupt to the bone, a discovery that unleashes a farcical chain of events.

Adèle Haenel co-stars as Yvonne, a police officer on French Riviera who discovers her dead husband Santi led a double life after a criminal she is interrogating recognises her wedding ring as the loot from a jewellery heist he helped stage.

The discovery sends her life into a tail-spin. Her late husband was hailed as a hero by his colleagues and their young son after he died in the line of duty. She grapples with whether she should come clean about her husband’s true persona. Close colleague Louis advises her to keep quiet.

Louis is played...

Three years ago Ed Skrein broke through on the big screen with roles in Brit flicks Piggy and Ill Manors. Now, after a brief stop over on Game of Thrones, he's poised to become Hollywood next big action star thanks to The Transporter Refuelled, a fresh take on the franchise previously led by Jason Statham.

Beyond that Skrein will be heading into Fox's Marvel universe to play assassin Ajax in Deadpool. Digital Spy caught up with the fast-rising actor to discuss his two hotly-anticipated movies.

How did Transporter Refuelled get pitched to you - is this a reboot or sequel to the previous films?

"From the beginning, everyone's always spoken about it in terms of when they would change personnel on Bond, that it would keep the same variables and the same things that the franchise is known for. But the change of personnel would change quite a lot of things,...

Rybojad’s Fictional Debut an Empty Husk

Director Stephane Rybojad, previously known for his work with French television documentaries, makes his fictional feature debut with Special Forces, a superfluous, timely message movie that flails itself at us with a generous amount of humanitarian well-meaning and poorly orchestrated combat sequences before devolving precariously into a survival of the elements picture. Assembling a first rate cast for his endeavor, this piece of journalistic championing posture play fails to enthrall on all levels, making this seem more like an adventurous piece of propaganda. Trying to be too many things at once, and not nearly well written enough to balance useless subplots, including a completely ill-conceived romance to top it all off, Rybojad’s film feels like an outline rather than a fully fleshed out feature.

War correspondent Elsa Cassanova (Diane Kruger) has been covering a hot news story concerning a woman named Maina,...

Chicago – In the latest HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film with our unique social giveaway technology, we have 25 pairs of movie passes up for grabs to the advance screening of the highly anticipated “Taken” sequel “Taken 2,” which stars Liam Neeson!

“Taken 2,” which opens on Oct. 5, 2012 and is rated “PG-13,” also stars Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, D.B. Sweeney, Luke Grimes, Rade Serbedzija, Kevork Malikyan, Alain Figlarz, Frank Alvarez, Ali Yildirim, Ergun Kuyucu, Cengiz Bozkurt and Hakan Karahan from director Olivier Megaton and writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.

To win your free passes to “Taken 2” courtesy of HollywoodChicago.com, just get interactive with our unique Hookup technology directly below. That’s it! This screening is on Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012 at 6 p.m. in downtown Chicago. The more social actions you complete, the more points you score and the higher yours odds of winning!

Before entering, make sure you allow pop-ups.

Luc Besson is known for having an eye for strong females to take the lead in his movies, and it seems like he was spot on again when it came time to cast the role of Cataleya Restrepo for his latest action flick Colombiana. Zoe Saldana stars as the vengeful Latina who, after witnessing the murder of her parents as a child, is trained by her uncle to become an assassin. Working closely with stunt coordinator Alain Figlarz, Zoe trained in martial arts and krav maga in order to portray the tough female character expected in a Luc Beson creation, much like the young Natalie Portman in Leon: The Professional. Whilst also choreographing action-packed fight scenes reminiscent of Milla Jovovich in “The Fifth Element,” and especially Anne Parillaud in “La Femme Nikita.” As a fellow Latina, I am proud to see a budding actress like Zoe take the lead in...

(Gaspard Ulliel, above. Photo by Nora Schaefer.)

By Terry Keefe

While playing a French historical character with the nickname of “le Balafré,” or “the Scarred,” in the new film The Princess of Montpensier, actor Gaspard Ulliel also risked his own famous features, while shooting some of the film’s highly realistic fight scenes. Although Ulliel does, in fact, sport a small scar on his left cheek from an accident with a dog when he was a child, the marks carried by his young warrior character in the film, the Duc de Guise, are considerably more pronounced, which isn’t surprising when you see Ulliel as the Duc in the heated battle scenes of Princess. Directed by legendary filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (interviewed by Alex Simon for our site here), The Princess of Montpensier takes place during the French Wars of Religion of the 1500s, and the director opted not to use many stuntmen,...

Two notable horror films will release on DVD and Blu-Ray this week. The titles include M. Night Shyamalan's Devil and Yannick Dahan's La Horde, or The Horde. Devil has been given some attention in a review on 28Dla; the review can be found here: Devil Movie Review. 28Dla writer, Ed Sum described the film as "what Shyamalan has created has the scope of being something larger than life." So, there is definitely some intrigue in the film. As well, the French film La Horde has made some waves by putting some thrills and action back into the coming zombie apocalypse. An international trailer for this film has previously been posted here: La Horde International Trailer.

Both of these titles will be made available December 21st and these releases will each host a whole slew of extras. The special features and more details on these films can be found inside.

IFC Films and Mpi Media Group will be distributing the French zombie apocalypse film La Horde to North American audiences December 21st. The release has been infected with several extra features including: a making of featurette, a short film prequel (Rivoallan), deleted scenes, an alternate opening and several more (Fangoria). Lots more from this list of special features are below along with a new English dubbed trailer for this bloodfest of a film. Check out all the details inside.

The synopsis for La Horde here:

"North of Paris, in order to avenge the murder of one of their own by a group of ruthless gangsters, four corrupt cops go on a rampage in a condemned building serving as the mobster's hideout. Now trapped, the officers are about to be executed when the unimaginable occurs; hordes of rage-fueled zombies invade the building, savagely attacking everyone. Unexpected alliances are made when their...

IFC has already announced that La Horde aka The Horde will have an August showing through the IFC Midnight label and a DVD release will follow shortly after that with partner Mpi Media Group (IFC). Now, an international trailer is available, which shows much of the violent action from the picture. A group of police officers and gangsters band together to fight off relentless attacks from the undead, where an unexplained virus sweeps the city. Have a watch as these characters become trapped in a high rise tenement below.

The synopsis for La Horde here:

"North of Paris, in order to avenge the murder of one of their own by a group of ruthless gangsters, four corrupt cops go on a rampage in a condemned building serving as the mobster's hideout. Now trapped, the officers are about to be executed when the unimaginable occurs; hordes of rage-fueled zombies invade the building,...

Ever since Alex Aja's High Tension broke onto the scene back in 2003, it seems that every year there is that one French horror film that is almost guaranteed to blow us out of the water. With word that Humains (Humans) and Mutants are quite the disappointment, there's a lot riding on The Horde, the zombie film being produced by Xavier Gens (Frontier(s)). Today we got our hands on the first teaser trailer that looks quite promising. What do you think? Directed by Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher, film follows an end of the world battle between gangsters, cops and zombies. Eriq Ebouaney, Jean-Pierre Martins, Aurélien Recoing, Claude Perron, Alain Figlarz all star.

Though it didn’t receive the same level of attention as Inside or Frontiere(s) - also debut films from fresh French directors - I am a big fan of Julien Leclerq’s Chrysalis, an icily precise sci-fi noir film with Albert Dupontel (Irreversible) and fight sequences from Bourne Identity choreographer Alain Figlarz. And now, thanks to the fine people at Anchor Bay Canada I’ve got five copies of the upcoming DVD to give away to the Twitch faithful. Want it? Just - the day the DVD releases - and name the unusual fight style employed by Figlarz in the film. The answer lies somewhere within the pages of Twitch ... good luck!

As some might remember, executive producer Xavier Gens talked about the new film La Horde with Blake Ethridge at the Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival (Nifff) in July 2008. According to CineEuropa, the seven week shoot on the film, which is being directed by Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher, has begun. The official synopsis from the film’s international seller Films Distribution is as follows:

North of Paris. In order to avenge the murder of one of their own by a group of ruthless gangsters, four corrupt cops go on a rampage in a condemned building serving as the mobster’s hideout. Now trapped, the officers are about to be executed when the unimaginable occurs: hordes of bloodthirsty, cannibalistic creatures invade the building, savagely attacking everyone. Unexpected alliances are made when their lives are threatened by the unthinkable.

The CineEuropa article adds that ”The Horde is presented as a combination of the series The Shield,...