MANILA, Philippines – Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind Oscar-winning films Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron, is being awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, organizers announced Wednesday, April 17.  “[Studio Ghibli’s] characters populate our imaginations with prolific, colorful universes and sensitive, engaging narrations. With Ghibli, Japanese animation stands as one of the great adventures of cinephilia, between tradition and modernity,” Iris Knobloch, president of the Festival de Cannes; and Thierry Frémaux, General Delegate, said in a press ..read more

In Alex Garland’s (Ex Machina, Annihilation) new dystopian epic, there is a war shrouded in ambiguity. In fact, Civil War may not even be about war in the way it has been advertised. Its lack of a militaristic point of view is only rivaled by its tendency to avoid political specificity.  A civil war, characterized as a nationwide conflict, finds the newly allied California and Texas pitted against the loyalist states supporting the incumbent president, who is suggested to be a power-hungry dictator. While there could easily be a novel’s worth of backstory explaining why Democrat-dominated ..read more

LONDON, United Kingdom – Zack Snyder says Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver shows his full vision for the franchise. The second installment of the sci-fi adventure picks up from where Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, released four months earlier, left off. It sees Sofia Boutella’s character Kora and a group of rebel warriors team up with the people of Veldt, a peaceful farming moon, to ward off an attack from the tyrannical Motherworld and its resurrected, ruthless military leader Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). “I always knew that this was going to be like half a movie. Our whole idea wa ..read more

SANTA FE, New Mexico –  Hannah Gutierrez, the chief weapons handler for the Western movie Rust, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday, April 15, in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was shot when actor Alec Baldwin was handling a gun during the film’s production in 2021. In March, Gutierrez, 27, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for mistakenly loading a live round into a revolver Baldwin was using on a Santa Fe, New Mexico, movie set. “You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer told Gutierrez as she ha ..read more

ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines – According to Zamboangueño filmmaker Sheron Dayoc, seeing his work The Gospel of The Beast win the Golden Star for Best Feature Film at the Ho Chi Minh City International Film Festival (HIFF) in Vietnam was “unexpected.” Having been on a seven-year hiatus from filmmaking prior to this victory, Dayoc did not expect to win the highest honor during awards night on Saturday, April 13, he told Rappler in an online interview. “Madami rin kasing magaganda na galing sa mamamalaking film festivals (There were many other great films from big festivals),” he said, citing the ..read more

Paramount Pictures won the dismissal of a lawsuit claiming its 2022 Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick borrowed too much from a 1983 magazine article that inspired the original Top Gun film. In a decision on Friday, April 5, US District Judge Percy Anderson in Los Angeles said the sequel was not “substantially similar” to Ehud Yonay’s “Top Guns,” about the US Navy’s Top Gun fighter pilot training school in San Diego. Yonay’s widow Shosh Yonay and son Yuval Yonay, heirs to his copyright, said they deserved some of the sequel’s profits, after Paramount built a ..read more

LONDON, United Kingdom – Amy Winehouse’s lyrics and music were the “guiding star” for director Sam Taylor-Johnson in bringing the late singer’s story to the screen in Back to Black. The biographical feature film follows Winehouse’s rise to fame and portrays her relationships with her family and former husband Blake Fielder-Civil.  It comes nearly 13 years after the six-time Grammy Award winner died from alcohol poisoning, aged 27. Considered one of the most talented singers of her generation, her untimely death shook the music world. Telling the story from Winehouse’s point ..read more

Spoilers ahead. There seems to be a steady energy in international cinema of late that contends with Filipino labor, steered by characters placed in scenarios that push them to make decisions that might alter the course of their lives. From the bewitching turn of Chai Fonacier in Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo to the intensity of Dolly de Leon’s ascent as island captain in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, the way these experiences are uprooted are often propelled by clever decoys and a sense of pertness, by sheer will to impress, revealing in the process the proclivity of its foreign makers for ..read more

Spoilers ahead. Fixating on absence and presence is a convenient entry point in examining any cinematic work, for the task, through this lens, then becomes undemanding, provided that the critic only ever points out what is there and what is not there in the work, forgoing any attempt at discernment. But in the case of The Zone of Interest, the latest film by Jonathan Glazer, that entry point, rigid as it may seem, gives way to a more thoughtful process of interrogation, more frames with which we make sense of our viewing experiences and possibly even the very lives we lead. Such is the case ch ..read more

MANILA, Philippines – Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) Acting Chairman Don Artes on Friday, April 5, announced the calendar of events and activities for the 50th Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). The 49th edition of the MMFF marked several milestones during its run. Apart from being the highest-grossing edition in the annual film festival’s history, it also produced one of the Philippines’ highest-grossing films of all time: Rewind. The festival was even extended for another week due to public clamor.  Unlike the usual eight films from previous editions, MMFF 2023 had a l ..read more