Movies truly are magic. It’s said a lot, but they are. There is literally no limit to storytelling when the ones bringing said story to an audience can flex their creative muscles. There is no right or wrong, allowing for an enthralling and encapsulating experience. When it comes to the cinema, stories have always been…
Hong Kong was once the Hollywood of the East. At its peak around the early 90s, our local movie industry was the first in the world – in terms of per capita production and as the second-largest exporter of films – second only to the US.The influence of Hong Kong cinema can still be seen far and wide. Even 50 years after his death, Bruce Lee remains a global icon and his martial arts movies are classics. The groundbreaking action of The Matrix would never have come about if not for John Woo films and the action choreography of Yuen Woo-ping. Quentin Tarantino ripped off Ringo Lam’s City on Fire for his 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs. Moonlight owes much to the style of Wong Kar-wai films and the auteur was also acknowledged by Soffia Coppola as an influence when she collected the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation.So with such a massive cultural legacy, what are the best Hong Kong movies of all time? Some of our choices are forgotten classics, some are cult hits, while others define art born of this city. Read on for a definitive ranking of the best films made in Hong Kong dating as far back as the 1930s.
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I love nothing more than a festive movie to get in the mood for Christmas. We watched Home Alone in our house on November 1, so that gives you an idea of how much we love a Christmas movie. But while the classics will never be beaten, and we watch them every year, I do…
Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreEvery now and then, an actor gets quite candid about dislking a film they once starred in.While the question “Do you have any career biggest regrets?” might perhaps be one of the more obvious ones a journalist can ask an actor. the answer can sometimes be rather revealing.Many Hollywood stars, recently including Chris Hemsworth and Orlando Bloom, have spoken negatively about their past choices. Hemsworth, as well as his co-star Christian Bale, are not fans of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder while Bloom said he has “blanked” 2004 film Troy from his memory.Others (we’re looking at you, Bill Murray) have even gone on to poke fun at their disliked role during a role in another film.Then there are those – for example Charlize Theron – have admitted accepting a film purely based on the director’s filmography, only to then be let down by the final result of their collaboration.Below, The Independent looks at 23 actors who have been vocal about disliking films they have starred in.George Clooney – Batman & Robin (1997)Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck – some of Hollywood’s best-known actors have played the Caped Crusader on screen. However, only one wore a suit with Batnipples – and that was George Clooney. “Let me just say that I’d actually thought I’d destroyed the franchise until somebody else brought it back years later and changed it,” he once said of the role. “I thought at the time that this was going to be a very good career move. It wasn’t.”Halle Berry – Catwoman (2004)Halle Berry remains one of the few actors to accept her Razzie award in person. “Thank you so much. I never in my life thought I would be up here,” she told the audience, before spoofing her own Oscar acceptance speech and thanking her manager. “He loves me so much that he convinces me to do projects even when he knows that it is s***.” She recently said she has been “carrying the weight” of the film’s failure, telling Jimmy Kimmel: “Whatever success it had or didn’t have somehow seemed like it was all my fault. But it really wasn’t my fault.”Ben Affleck – Daredevil (2003)If you hate Daredevil, Ben Affleck hates it more. “Daredevil didn’t work at all”, the actor told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. “If I wanted to go viral, I would be less polite.” He’d give the superhero genre another go, accepting the role of Bruce Wayne for Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman, with better, if underwhelming, results.Ben Affleck, like most of us, wasn’t a fan of ‘Daredevil’
Belmont City Press Hosts Special Emmy Award Winning and Grammy-Nominated Experts on Tell Us a Story Podcast – Movie Industry Today – EIN Presswire
Nostalgia alert! Salman Khan and Karisma Kapoor-starrer ‘Biwi No. 1’ is all set to be re-released in cinema halls. On Thursday, producer Vashu Bhagnani shared the update, disclosing the re-release date of the hit film, which also starred Tabu, Sushmita Sen and Anil Kapoor. The movie was originally released in 1999, and now it will return to theatres on November 29. Excited about the re-release, producer Vashu Bhagnani in a press note said, “Biwi No. 1 holds a special place in our hearts. The movie connected with audiences against all odds and won the hearts of millions. Bringing it back to the big screen gives us a chance to relive the laughter and fun, especially with its amazing star cast. The magic of this film is timeless, and we want every cinegoer to remember the joy of laughter.” Director David Dhawan also expressed equal enthusiasm. “Audiences still talk about the film’s humor and the joy it brought to families. Comedy films are best enjoyed when watched in a group and on the big screen. Re-releasing Biwi No. 1 will give fans a chance to celebrate those memories and introduce new viewers,” he shared.
The comedy drama revolves around the life of Prem as Salman Khan, a successful businessman who is married to Pooja as Karisma Kapoor. Prem’s life takes a dramatic turn when he meets Rupali as Sushmita Sen, a glamorous model, and they begin an affair.
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Unbeknownst to Prem, Pooja is aware of his infidelity and decides to teach him a lesson by pretending to be an ideal wife while planning her own revenge. ‘Biwi No. 1’ received a positive response from the audience and was the second highest-grossing film of Bollywood in 1999. The film’s soundtrack, composed by Anu Malik, became immensely popular, featuring hit songs like ‘Chunari Chunari’, ‘Ishq Sona’ and ‘Mujhe Maaf Karna’.Saif Ali Khan appeared in a special cameo in the film.(Except for the headline, this article has not been edited by FPJ’s editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
The teaser trailer has arrived for ‘Back in Action‘, the new action-comedy film coming to Netflix.Directed by Seth Gordon (‘Horrible Bosses’), who wrote the screenplay with Brendan O’Brien (‘Neighbours’), the film stars Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Kyle Chandler, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou, McKenna Roberts, Rylan Jackson and Glenn Close.
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Years after giving up life as CIA spies to start a family, Emily (Diaz) and Matt (Foxx) find themselves dragged back into the world of espionage when their cover is blown.
The film is produced by Jenno Topping, Peter Chernin and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett (‘Ford v Ferrari’, ‘Hidden Figures’, ‘Luther’) for Chernin Entertainment; Beau Bauman (‘Central Intelligence’) for Good One Productions; Seth Gordon for Exhibit A. The executive producers are Jamie Foxx, Datari Turner, Brendan O’Brien and Tim Lewis.Take a look at the key art for ‘Back in Action’ below:Credit: Netflix‘Back in Action’ will premiere on Netflix on 17th January 2025.
Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreEvery now and then, an actor gets quite candid about dislking a film they once starred in.While the question “Do you have any career biggest regrets?” might perhaps be one of the more obvious ones a journalist can ask an actor. the answer can sometimes be rather revealing.Many Hollywood stars, recently including Chris Hemsworth and Orlando Bloom, have spoken negatively about their past choices. Hemsworth, as well as his co-star Christian Bale, are not fans of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder while Bloom said he has “blanked” 2004 film Troy from his memory.Others (we’re looking at you, Bill Murray) have even gone on to poke fun at their disliked role during a role in another film.Then there are those – for example Charlize Theron – have admitted accepting a film purely based on the director’s filmography, only to then be let down by the final result of their collaboration.Below, The Independent looks at 23 actors who have been vocal about disliking films they have starred in.George Clooney – Batman & Robin (1997)Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck – some of Hollywood’s best-known actors have played the Caped Crusader on screen. However, only one wore a suit with Batnipples – and that was George Clooney. “Let me just say that I’d actually thought I’d destroyed the franchise until somebody else brought it back years later and changed it,” he once said of the role. “I thought at the time that this was going to be a very good career move. It wasn’t.”Halle Berry – Catwoman (2004)Halle Berry remains one of the few actors to accept her Razzie award in person. “Thank you so much. I never in my life thought I would be up here,” she told the audience, before spoofing her own Oscar acceptance speech and thanking her manager. “He loves me so much that he convinces me to do projects even when he knows that it is s***.” She recently said she has been “carrying the weight” of the film’s failure, telling Jimmy Kimmel: “Whatever success it had or didn’t have somehow seemed like it was all my fault. But it really wasn’t my fault.”Ben Affleck – Daredevil (2003)If you hate Daredevil, Ben Affleck hates it more. “Daredevil didn’t work at all”, the actor told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. “If I wanted to go viral, I would be less polite.” He’d give the superhero genre another go, accepting the role of Bruce Wayne for Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman, with better, if underwhelming, results.Ben Affleck, like most of us, wasn’t a fan of ‘Daredevil’
You can’t possibly look at Ernest Cole’s haunting photography, capturing the struggle for South Africans during apartheid, and not immediately and urgently think about what Palestinians are living through today. Ernest Cole: Lost And Found, the latest documentary from I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck, pours over those violent images captured by the late photographer in his 1967 book House of Bondage. They show South Africans living with a proverbial boot to their neck – constantly policed, segregated, barred entry to not just spaces but employment opportunities their European oppressors access freely, having their homes bulldozed for new settlements and their marches brutally met with gunfire – viscerally recalling what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank.“Yes, those parallels are clearly in the film,” says Peck, on a Zoom call, adding that it’s those types of connections that inspire him to tell whatever story he pursues. “In this film you can also see the western world not wanting to boycott South Africa while doing business with them: selling arms, buying arms, buying gold, uranium.”“But it’s not my job to point to anything,” Peck continues, speaking not just to his new film but all his work. “That’s the contract between me and the person watching the film. I leave space for you to bring in your own current situation, to help you understand the world as it is now.”Peck is a former minister of culture in Haiti who has lived in West Berlin, Paris and the US, describing his experience as a life in exile. His films going back 40 years are often drawn to people whose relationship to their homes are tenuous, uncertain or altogether severed, whether politically or violently. His first narrative feature, 2000’s Lumumba, focused on the Congo leader’s exile. Last year’s Silver Dollar Road stuck by a Black family whose home comes under threat from land developers.His HBO series Exterminate All The Brutes, examines genocide as a pillar of the European and US cultures, wiping Indigenous, African and Jewish people from their homes. Though what’s happening in Israel falls just outside that show’s purview, Peck highlights a passing mention in Exterminate All The Brutes of a Palestinian suicide bomber. “I ask the question, what would I have done if it was my daughter? Would I call her a monster? That’s how I address it.”Peck is speaking from a hotel room in New York City, where his latest subject Ernest Cole lived in exile and died in 1990. Peck’s film isn’t just a showcase of Cole’s work in House of Bondage, which the photographer published at 27, exposing the world to casual horrors in the country he could no longer return to due to apartheid. The film also explores selections among 60,000 negatives that mysteriously surfaced seven years ago in a Swedish bank vault, lost images Cole had taken while he was living in the US, touring the American south as well as Europe, before he became despondent, houseless for some years and fallen of the map. Many of the alternately warm and striking images Cole shot in places such as Alabama observe African American life; the joys and the resilience, but also the echoes to his experience in Johannesburg, the oppression that they share with their counterparts across the world.“It’s the view of a 26-year-old, 27-year-old South African who has spent all his life in an apartheid prison,” says Peck, “discovering something that was sold to him as the free world. That alone is worth observing. What does he do? What does he catch? What does he see?”Ernest Cole: Lost and Found works as a companion piece to Peck’s James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, in that it’s also about a critical voice who experienced varying realities through travel and refused to have his humanity reduced to just being Black. “Baldwin is somebody who always said: ‘I don’t let anybody define who I am,’” says Peck. “And I learned that very early in my life. I read Baldwin when I was 16. And he gave me the gave me the tools, already.”View image in fullscreenWhere the Baldwin documentary had the author’s words but also his footage of him speaking passionately during interviews, the new film has photographs, Peck’s camera moving within them, directing our gaze, searching for the details Cole would have fixated on. An image from South Africa, when a white child in a bathing suit innocently sips water from a park fountain, the camera pans up to reveal the violence of a Europeans-only sign hanging just above her. “Beyond the innocence”, Peck says.The film also pairs Cole’s photos with his own words. Atlanta actor LaKeith Stanfield lends his voice as Cole to the criticism and poetry found in House of Bondage’s prose, subsequent letters he wrote or observations pieced together from testimonies of those who knew or witnessed him. In a street scene showing a young Black man interrogated by police, the camera scans the crowd around him. Cole asks what each person in the photo is thinking, how they see themselves in relation to the anxious police interaction on the street, as either the next potential victim or the white man calmly affirmed that things are the way they should be.In the US, Cole photographs white citizens, describing and mulling over the way they look into his camera, and regard him, with indignance or suspicion. Such photos aren’t just a window into the US’s soul, but Cole’s own. When he photographs couples on the street embracing each other, there’s an ache in his words as he ruminates on their public displays of affection. “You can see how cold it was for him in the metropolis,” says Peck. “That he was isolated.”That isolation is even more pronounced when Cole describes the unhoused people he captures sleeping on the street or benches. “Empty useless bodies”, he says, reflecting perhaps on himself. “My ultimate photos.”View image in fullscreenWhile there’s no record of what Cole is going through when those photos are taken, and only assumptions as far as addiction projected onto him, Peck is confident he can fill in the gaps, at least emotionally. “Having been in exile myself, I know what happened,” he says. “Knowing what is happening in your country every day and not be able to do anything, that can make you crazy. That can depress you. It’s like PTSD, before it was diagnosed as such.”For Peck, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a reclamation of the photographer’s voice, a film that forgoes talking head interviews and the opinions of others – and instead leaves the space for the artist to tell his own story.“It was about Ernest taking back his power,” says Peck, describing how his film, and even the way his camera points in habits the artists gaze. “Because he had been disempowered for the last 50 years … I wanted to give him the total podium to talk about his work, to talk about his life and even beyond his death.”
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is out in New York cinemas on 22 November, Los Angeles on 29 November, with more cities to follow and a UK date to be announced
More than three years after the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust,” the film made its debut Wednesday at the Camerimage Film Festival in Poland.“It’s bittersweet,” the film’s director, Joel Souza, said in an interview after the premiere. “I think we would all have preferred that the movie was finished a long time ago, that Halyna was there standing proudly talking about it.”On Oct. 21, 2021, “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed when Alec Baldwin’s prop gun fired a live round of ammunition on set. The bullet also hit Souza in the shoulder.Baldwin was charged with one count of manslaughter, but the case was dismissed over the summer after the judge in his trial found that New Mexico prosecutors had suppressed evidence. “It’s been so long living with the movie and everything that happened and just all the sort of … insanity that kind of engulfed everything,” Souza said. “There is a sense of relief, I think, in this moment finally having happened.”Baldwin was noticeably absent from the premiere, but Souza urged observers not to read too much into it. “I doubt that [his attending] was ever even discussed. I mean, this is a cinematographers’ film festival,” he said. Also not attending were Hutchins’ mother, father and sister, who stayed in their native Ukraine. In a statement on the eve of the premiere, the family said through their attorney, Gloria Allred, that they were boycotting the event because Baldwin never formally apologized. They also asserted that the producers are profiting from the tragedy. Alec Baldwin in “Rust.”FlixPix / AlamyBaldwin’s representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Rust Movie Production pushed back against the family’s statement.“Gloria Allred’s misrepresentation of both the Camerimage festival and any profit motivation is disappointing,” it said. “The decision to complete ‘Rust’ was made with the full support of Halyna’s family.”The film’s new cinematographer, Bianca Cline, said the production team chose to finish the film in part to honor Hutchins’ work. “It’s also awful that that’s the only thing that the majority of the world knows Halyna for, and hopefully, via this film, people will know her as a cinematographer and how she sees the world, rather than just seeing what happened to her,” she said. Hutchins’ husband, Matthew Hutchins, received an undisclosed financial settlement from Baldwin and the film’s producers and was an executive producer for the completed project. Souza said the producers hope to announce soon where moviegoers can watch the film for themselves.