LOS ANGELES, USA – When Zendaya first read the script for director Luca Guadagnino’s romantic sports film Challengers, she immediately understood that the tennis player turned coach she would portray was unapologetic about her own power and how she wielded it. “I also think that she isn’t immediately dislikable, and she isn’t perfect, and she isn’t trying to be and we’re not making any excuses for that either,” Zendaya said about her character, Tashi Duncan. At the Los Angeles premiere of the film, Zendaya took to the stage in her neon green halter dress and urged audiences not to judge t ..read more

MANILA, Philippines – Time to rejoice, JoshLia fans! After four years, former celebrity couple Joshua Garcia and Julia Barretto are set to reunite on the big screen with the film UN/HAPPY FOR YOU.   In a press conference on Wednesday, April 25, Star Cinema and VIVA Films announced that the reunion project will be directed by filmmaker Petersen Vargas, and written by Kookai Labayen, Crystal San Miguel, and Jen Chuansu.  The two, who dated in real life from 2017 to 2019, both expressed their excitement in working together again, adding that they’re both okay despite their romantic ..read more

LOS ANGELES, USA – It’s one of the most beautifully acted, directed, and written scenes in recent cinema. In Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, both Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), best friends since they were 12, fall for young tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) as soon as they see her for the first time on the court. Competition between the two boys, also fledgling tennis players, who were pre-teen roommates at a tennis academy, kicks in when they meet and chat with Tashi at the tournament party later that night. The trio, all 18 years old, hit it off ..read more

LONDON, United Kingdom – After serving “Kenergy” with Barbie,, actor Ryan Gosling turns the spotlight on the movie-makers whose job is to shine on screen while remaining invisible in The Fall Guy. The film is inspired by the popular 1980s TV series of the same name and stars Gosling as Colt Seavers, a top Hollywood stuntman down on his luck after an on-set accident.  An ambitious film producer (Hannah Waddingham) manages to pull Colt out of his self-imposed post-injury isolation in order to rescue the directorial debut of the love of his life, Jody (Emily Blunt), following the disapp ..read more

If you had read my review of Rebel Moon: Part One, you’d have noticed that I was nice to the film, pointing out how its video game qualities actually act as its strength. But after watching the second part of Zack Snyder’s space epic, I sincerely believe that I may have been wrong in that assessment. In an ironic twist of fate, we are now living in an era where adaptations of video games have never been better. The recent Amazon Prime Fallout series has exceeded expectations in terms of worldbuilding and storytelling, and HBO’s The Last of Us became an Emmy Award-winning phenomenon. But wherea ..read more

Spoilers ahead. MANILA, Philippines – In his essay on Ruben Abalos’s Hayok, a Bomba film released in 1970, Ishmael Bernal notes the use of the phrase “pagnanasang kaibaiba,” which roughly translates to “strange desire,” to illustrate bisexual desire. It’s a euphemism my mind keeps drifting to as I mull over Jun Lana’s R-18 erotica, Your Mother’s Son, which I read as the director’s elaborate attempt at the Bomba genre, most notable for inducing spectatorial pleasure out of the explicit display of sexual and sexualized bodies – women’s bodies in particular. In this case, though, Lana stretches t ..read more

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