News

Disney to give Marvel superhero film the widest release since UK cinemas reopened in May.

After a delay of more than a year, Disney has finally released Marvel superhero adventure Black Widow in the UK and Ireland, and will deliver the territory’s widest theatrical release since cinemas began reopening in May.

The comic book adaptation, starring Scarlett Johansson and directed by Cate Shortland, opened in 622 venues in the UK on Wednesday (July 7) – two days ahead of the US – and generated £1.2m of its first day of release. The takings were impacted by England’s win over Denmark in the...

Star-powered propaganda flick “1921â€. hit number one at the Chinese box office this week, bringing in $11.6 million from pre-screenings ahead of its July 1 debut, according to Maoyan data.

The historical drama debuted earlier this month as the opening night title of the Shanghai Intl. Film Festival. Backed by Tencent Pictures and Shanghai Film Group, the film was created as a tribute to the country’s ruling Communist Party on the July 1 occasion of the 100th anniversary of its founding.

The drama is co-directed by Huang Jianxin and Zheng Dasheng. It features a long list of some 100 celebrities who star or appear in cameos as key figures in Communist party history,, including Liu Haoran, and many others.

The second most popular title this weekend was the holdover Taiwanese rom-com “Man in Love.â€. It grossed a further $5.35 million to bring its cume up to $27.6 million. Starring Roy Chiu and Tiffany Hsu, it...

The Shanghai International Film Festival, China’s longest-running major cinema event, is set to return with a sizable in-person edition in June.

The festival, which shifted to a curtailed online offering last year amid the pandemic, unveiled both its 2021 international competition jury and full selection this week.

The jury will be led by Chinese producer Huang Jianxi as president, with the rest of the panel made up by Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen, Chinese actor-director Deng Chao, Chinese actor Song Jia, former Venice festival chief Marco Mueller and China-based French producer Natacha Devillers. Unlike in most years, there are no established ...

After shifting last year to an online format, the Shanghai International Film Festival will return for its 24th edition later this month. The festival will play as an in-person event, while the market sections will be hybrids of in-person and online activities.

The TV festival runs from June 6, while the film festival runs from June 11-20. A prize ceremony for its Golden Goblet awards will be held on June 19.

The jury that will select the competition winners includes: Chinese producer Huang Jianxi as president; Singapore filmmaker Anthony Chen; Chinese director and actor Deng Chao; Italian film festival selector Marco Mueller; Shanghai-based French producer Natacha Devillers; and Chinese actor Song Jia.

Organizers said that the festival was being in the spirit of “strong recovery and leading momentum of Chinese films in the world, with three-fold focuses on Asia, attention to China and support for new talent.

Main Competition

“Amateurs”

Dir. Iwona Siekierzynska (Poland)

“Barbarian Invasion”

Dir.

Goodridge joins the International Film Festival & Awards Macao in its second year of operation.

Protagonist Pictures CEO Mike Goodridge has been appointed artistic director of the International Film Festival & Awards Macao (Iffam).

Goodridge is stepping down from Protagonist in August, but will remain on the company’s board of directors.

The second edition of the Iffam is scheduled to take place at the Macao Cultural Centre from December 8-14.

The Iffam Organising Committee has also announced that the festival’s competition programme would be dedicated to films from first and second time film-makers and that the jury would award a $60,000 prize for best feature.

“This is a young festival and we think that our international competition should consist of work from young directors who can offer fresh perspectives on the world we live in,” said Goodridge.

Meanwhile Goodridge, head of festival management Lorna Tee and head of industry June Wu will focus on developing the Iffam Industry...

Shock move comes one month before inaugural edition of Macao event.

Veteran festival director Marco Mueller has quit his post as head of the International Film Festival & Awards Macao one month ahead of the event’s first edition (December 8-13).

The surprise move was confirmed this morning by organisers who also said the festival would continue “as planned”.

“The organising committee of 1st International Film Festival and Awards Macao (Iffam) received notice from Macau Films & Television Productions and Culture Association (Mftpa) that Mr Marco Mueller has resigned from his position as festival director with effect from 13 November 2016.

“Mftpa reassures the organising committee that the secretariat will assume all responsibilities of the festival director and that this incident will not affect the organisation of the festival as planned.”

An explanation for the abrupt departure has not been disclosed.

The Macau event, backed by the territory’s culture and tourism authorities, is set to include a competition, out-of-competition and gala...

A trio of high-profile Chinese film executives discussed the reasons why the Chinese and Japanese film industries are not regular collaborators at the Japan Content Showcase (Jcs) on Tuesday.

Bona Film Group COO Jeffrey Chan kicked off the session by recalling 2006 historical epic Battle Of Wits (pictured) a rare co-production between China, Japan and Korea that has never been repeated. The film brought together two of the day’s speakers – Chinese director-producer Huang Jianxin and Japanese producer Satoru Iseki, who was moderating the panel.

“But since then we haven’t seen any collaborations on that level between the three countries,” said Chan. “After that I tried to raise a film fund between China, Korea and Japan, but was not successful.”

Huang said the film grossed around $15m (RMB100m) in China, which was considered a hit at that stage in the country’s box office development. He then explained how Japanese filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa have influenced...

Festival consultants to include James Schamus, Olivier Père, Huang Jianxin and Michael J. Werner.

The inaugural International Film Festival and Awards Macao (Iffam, Dec 8 – 13), spearheaded by former Venice and Rome chief Marco Mueller, will have a strong but not exclusive focus on genre titles, the festival has announced.

The event will include a number of gala and red carpet screenings, with a competition strand and special focus sections alongside an industry screening programme, masterclasses, education initiatives and a co-production event.

The festival’s screening programme will encompass the following strands:

• Competition – 10 to 12 new international films to be judged by a jury of five film professionals

• Out of Competition / Gala – a selection of 6 of the most important works from the latter half of the year

• Hidden Dragons – 6 films representing the latest trends in contemporary Asian genre cinema

• Best of Fest Panorama – 5 or 6 award-winning feature films from major international festivals

• Crossfire – 12 non-East Asian, non-us genre films...

The Zhongze China-uk Film Fund has signed a strategic partnership with Smg Pictures, which kicks off with London-set comedy Special Couple.

Zhongze will help facilitate the project’s UK shoot including access to local cast and crew.

Fully financed by Smg Pictures, the Chinese-language project tells the story of two Chinese male friends living in London – one a medical student and the other an illegal immigrant – who pretend to be a couple so they can both stay in the UK.

Creative talent on the film includes director-producer Huang Jianxin and script supervisor Su Huan. Smg Pictures is the film production...

Chinese studio bosses said they plan to continue their acquisition spree, in order to strengthen the fast-growing local film industry, as the seminar programme at the Shanghai International Film Festival got underway on Sunday.

“We will acquire more content producers in future so we have IP to make into films and games,” said Zeng Maojun, vice president of Wanda Culture Industry Group, which recently acquired Warcraft producer Legendary Pictures.

He later added: “The reason we bought Legendary was to marry their experience with the China market for better effect.”

Zhang Qiang, executive director and CEO of Alibaba Pictures, said his...

China’s Bona Film Group has unveiled an ambitious 26-picture slate to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary, along with a strategic cooperation with Huaxia Film Distribution.

Bona Film Group founder and CEO Yu Dong said he expected the slate would gross a combined $1.6bn (RMB10bn) at the China box office. The slate announcement came just days after it emerged that Bona is trying to delist from the Nasdaq.

Speaking at the Siff Forum on Monday, Yu Dong said it wasn’t surprising that he wanted to take his company private again because “my audience and customers are in China – coming home is the wish of all our investors and partners.”

Bona, which floated on New York’s Nasdaq exchange in 2010, currently has investors including Studio 8 backer Fosun International and private equity company Sequoia.

The company’s new slate includes Ang Lee’s previously announced Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which Bona is...

Taiwanese actress Sylvia Chang's latest directorial effort Murmur Of The Hearts will open the 39th Hong Kong International Film Festival, it was announced today. The world premiere is part of a Filmmaker in Focus programme dedicated to Chang, which will screen 13 of her films, including Legend Of The Mountain, Passion and Queen Of Temple Street.May We Chat director Philip Yung's latest, Port Of Call, will close the festival, which runs from 23 March - 6 April 2015. Gala presentations include debuts for the latest pan-Asian anthology Beautiful 2015 (with segments from Huang Jianxin, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Yim Ho and Tsai Ming-liang), the directorial debut from Painted Skin and The Great Magician scribe Lau Ho Leung, Two Thumbs Up, the local premiere of Tsui Hark's 3D...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

A24’s A Most Violent Year will dominate the Specialty Box Office New Year’s weekend. The feature began as director J.C. Chandor was releasing his previous feature, All Is Lost. A Most Violent Year will begin its limited run in the New Year, but the title will have a wide release by the end of the month. Also opening this weekend is IFC Films’ doc The Search For General Tso, which has its roots from a New York Times Best Seller. Well Go USA will bow China’s The Taking Of Tiger Mountain in exclusive engagements. The title opened number one at home when it rolled out ahead of Christmas. And Magnolia’s genre label, Magnet, will open Spanish thriller [Rec] 4: Apocalypse in five locations January 2. the title is already available via ultra-vod.

A Most Violent Year

Director-writer: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Alessandro Nivola,...

Martin Scorsese's released a statement commending Kodak for its decision to carry on making film stock. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Films by Todd Rohal, Nacho Vigalondo and Kevin Smith are lined up for Austin's Fantastic Fest. A terrific interview with Werner Herzog. An appreciation of the neglected Fifth Generation Chinese director Huang Jianxin. A play about Jane Fonda. Richard Linklater's next project, plus a forthcoming documentary on Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and more. » - David Hudson...

Martin Scorsese's released a statement commending Kodak for its decision to carry on making film stock. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Films by Todd Rohal, Nacho Vigalondo and Kevin Smith are lined up for Austin's Fantastic Fest. A terrific interview with Werner Herzog. An appreciation of the neglected Fifth Generation Chinese director Huang Jianxin. A play about Jane Fonda. Richard Linklater's next project, plus a forthcoming documentary on Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and more. » - David Hudson...

Here's a couple of new photos from Iron Man 3 featuring veteran Chinese actor Wang Xueqi, who was recently confirmed to play a new character named Dr. Wu in the film. It was previously speculated that he would play Chen Lu/Radioactive Man, but it doesn't look like that's the case. Apparently the role will be small a small one, unless something is being hidden from the fans. The photos feature the actor with Robert Downey Jr., Gweneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle.

Xueqi is considered the Chinese Sean Connery, and has had a successful 25 years, appearing in films such as Yellow Earth (1984) and The Big Parade (1986), Huang Jianxin’s Samsara, and Zhang Yimou’s Codename Cougar (1989), and more recently the award-winning Forever Enthralled (2008) and Bodyguards and Assassins (2009).

The movie will start shooting in Beijing, China today Monday, December 10th.

Exclusive: Marvel starts filming several Iron Man 3 scenes in Beijing on Monday. And I’ve learned from my Chinese-based movie biz sources that the studio has just cast leading Chinese actor Wang Xueqi as a new character playing “Dr. Wu”. The highly secretive Marvel has been prepping for the shoot for a week in Mainland China. Dmg Entertainment is Iron Man 3’s Chinese distributor, and is working to help staff the shoot on the ground. Marvel still intends to file for co-production status – but apparently they have a permit to film and are ready to go on that front. It was rumored a few months ago that Hong Kong actor Andy Lau would be joining Iron Man 3 as an ally of billionaire inventor Tony Stark, but he quickly backed out. Then several online comic book sites claimed 64-year-old Xueqi would be a last minute addition taking on...

"Cars 2, directed (like several great Pixar films of the last two decades) by John Lasseter, finds itself in the unlucky position of the not-so-bright kid in a brilliant family," finds Slate's Dana Stevens. "No matter if his performance in school is comfortably average; he'll always be seen as a disappointment compared to his stellar siblings. There's nothing really objectionable about Cars 2, although parents of young children should be warned that a few evil vehicles meet violently inauspicious ends. It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal."

Nick Schager for the Voice: "Pixar's Cars franchise takes a sharp turn from Nascar mayhem and rural red-state-targeted 50s nostalgia to 007 espionage with this upgraded sequel, though in its...

Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping's Beginning of the Great Revival Political propaganda has always been a movie staple, from Rupert Julian's The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, made during World War I, and Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-glorifying Triumph of the Will to Leo McCarey's anti-Red My Son John and Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping's pro-Red Beginning of the Great Revival. Featuring an all-star that includes John Woo, Andy Lau, Daniel Wu, Zhou Xun, Chow Yun-fat, and Curse of the Golden Flower's Liu Ye as Mao Zedong, Beginning of the Great Revival had its premiere today as part of commemorations for the 90th anniversary of the [...]...

[Our Thanks to Christopher Bourne for the following review.]

Aliens, ninjas, mutant girls, soft porn, ass-kicking martial arts, unclassifiable weirdness ... the New York Asian Film Festival truly has something for everyone, and these elements are perennials of this festival that is now in its ninth year. Such creatures and film genres, in fact, should by now be expected sights at the Nyaff.

However, one of the true oddities of this year's selections is Ye Daying's Tian An Men, a slightly modernized slice of straight-up Prc propaganda created for last year's 60th anniversary of the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China.

Tian An Men is very much a throwback to the Chinese state productions of the 1950s and 1960s which glorified China with heroic episodes from the country's history. The most famous cinematic product of last year's celebration/nostalgia trip in China was Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping's The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded super-production that detailed...

Chicago – In the opening moments of Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s “The Warlords,” martial arts superstar Jet Li performs one of his bravest physical feats yet. He breaks into tears. This comes as a bit of a shock, considering Li’s status as one of China’s most formidable onscreen ass-kickers. Yet it’s in keeping with Chan’s uncommonly emotional approach to depicting historical events often drained of humanity.

“Warlords” debuted in China one year before the release of John Woo’s overblown epic “Red Cliff.” Both films purport themselves to be antiwar pictures, yet in the case of Woo’s epic, the expensive spectacle is romanticized to such a degree that it fails to impact the audience on a visceral level. When arrows are shot through the sky, Woo follows the arrows from their point of view, evoking the tone of a video game rather than actual warfare. There...

(Better late than never. Time to wrap up my series of reviews taking a look at the work of director Huang Jianxin, best known in the West - indirectly - for propaganda blockbuster The Founding of a Republic. I wanted to point out he's done quite a bit more than that, so here's some of his work that deserves more attention.)

Bureaucracy gone mad, the older generation victimising the younger, people clinging stubbornly to the past - Huang Jianxin's The Marriage Certificate has the kind of premise where if it turned up in a production from China's Fifth and Sixth generations or Taiwan's New Wave, you'd expect the Prc to get a mauling.

The plot ranges far wider than most of Huang's films - it still focuses on something very intimate (a relationship in danger of falling apart) but it draws a direct line from past events to a present gone wrong,...

(Better late than never. Time to wrap up my series of reviews taking a look at the work of director Huang Jianxin, best known in the West - indirectly - for propaganda blockbuster The Founding of a Republic. I wanted to point out he's done quite a bit more than that, so here's some of his work that deserves more attention.)

The 'cop soap opera' genre has enjoyed a long and storied history over the past few decades, with notable contributions from all over the world. The idea of a small brotherhood of men (and women) fighting the good fight against both petty and organised crime drove a significant part of the Hong Kong film industry's golden age, and its staying power is plainly obvious from the work of blockbuster Hollywood auteurs down to primetime comfort food on sundry television networks across the globe.

Xian's Finest is director Huang Jianxin...

(Though he's now (indirectly) best known in the West for The Founding of a Republic making the Prc very large sums of money, director Huang Jianxin remains one of Chinese cinema's best-kept secrets. For more than twenty years he's been making films documenting the vagaries of contemporary life on the mainland, the best of them richly detailed, funny, intelligent and thoughtful, but outside of a few festival appearances and academic citations he's gone largely unrecognised outside his domestic market. In the hope of pointing out he's done quite a bit more than co-direct one of the highest profile works of propaganda ever conceived, here's some of his work that deserves more attention.)

Hell hath no fury like a civil servant spurned, apparently. In 1994's Back to Back, Face to Face, Huang Jianxin explores the lengths a minor functionary ends up going to in order to make life miserable for everyone who's ever wronged him.

(Though he's now (indirectly) best known in the West for The Founding of a Republic making the Prc very large sums of money, director Huang Jianxin remains one of Chinese cinema's best-kept secrets. For more than twenty years he's been making films documenting the vagaries of contemporary life on the mainland, the best of them richly detailed, funny, intelligent and thoughtful, but outside of a few festival appearances and academic citations he's gone largely unrecognised outside his domestic market. In the hope of pointing out he's done quite a bit more than co-direct one of the highest profile works of propaganda ever conceived, here's some of his work that deserves more attention.)

Samsara is the endless cycle of death and rebirth at the centre of many eastern religions - the idea of human existence as perpetual suffering, a slow, painful crawl towards enlightenment with no end in sight. Many belief...

More Afm news

Hong Kong -- Big-budget Chinese period thriller "Bodyguards and Assassins" has been sold by We Distribution to four territories at the beginning of the American Film Market.

E1 Entertainment picked up the film for the U.K. and Canada, while Cj Entertainment bought it for South Korea and Gulf Films took it for the Middle East.

The $23 million film directed by Teddy Chan is set in early 20th century Hong Kong with all the action taking place on the day of a failed assassination attempt on Sun Yat-sen. Its all-star cast includes Donnie Yen, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Leon Lai and Simon Yam.

" 'Bodyguards and Assassins' caters to the intelligence and appetites of China's increasingly sophisticated and fast-expanding audiences. I am also thrilled that we have phenomenal response from territories outside mainland China," producer Peter Chan Ho-sun said.

The film is already destined for a wide Asian release Dec.

As the People's Republic of China approaches its 60th anniversary, the Communist Party is attempting to woo the nation's youth with a new movie that's celebrity-rich.

According to an Associated Press report, Jian Guo Da Ye, which translates to The Founding of a Republic, opens in theatres in two weeks. It will retell the story of the Communist Party's triumph, and feature brief appearances by Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Stephen Chow, and many others.

The film represents a tactical shift for China's ruling party with regards to getting its message out. In the recent past, the nation's state-supported film and TV industry produced predictable fare on conservative budgets, which mostly appealed to older audiences. Those films, featuring dowdy revolutionary heroes, were considered out of touch with the more slick, well-dressed action stars and pop singers coming out of Hong Kong and South Korea.

Meanwhile, Chinese artists who made it abroad...