MOVIES

Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/ Universal Pictures

Hopes were always high for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The studio knew the film was great, and commercial. But no one in the industry expected that a long, talky, R-rated drama released at the height of the summer movie season would earn over $900 million at the box office.

After an early screening, “ Dune” filmmaker Denis Villeneuve said he knew he’d just seen “a masterpiece.” He even remembered saying that it would be a big success.

“But where it is right now has blown the roof off of my projection,” Villeneuve told The Associated Press. “It’s a three-hour movie about people talking about nuclear physics.”

Photo Credit: Richard Shotwell / invision

“The Drew Barrymore Show” will begin airing fresh episodes on Monday but a lot of off-air controversy will be clinging to its typically bubbly host.

Barrymore — a daughter of a proud acting dynasty — is making new batches of her syndicated talk show despite picketers outside her studio, as daytime TV becomes the latest battlefield in the ongoing Hollywood labor strife.

Photo Credit: Loic Venance / AFP

Venice hosted an unprecedented collaboration between Israeli and Iranian filmmakers, who say there are similarities between their governments and hope they can set an example for greater unity between their people.

"Tatami", shown in the "Orizzonti" ("Horizons") section of the Venice Film Festival, recounts the story of an Iranian judo star who rejects her government's rules about never facing an Israeli athlete in an international competition.

It was jointly directed by award-winning Iranian actress Zar Amir, who also stars as the judoka's trainer, and Israel's Guy Nattiv, known for the recent biopic of Israeli ex-prime minister Golda Meir ("Golda").

"At school, I was taught that Israel does not exist," said Amir (who recently dropped her other surname, Ebrahimi).

"We are not allowed to work together, to meet, to make friends or compete with this imaginary enemy," she told AFP.
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Photo Credit: VALERIE MACON / AFP

Hollywood writers marked the 100th day of their industry-crippling strike Wednesday, dubbing the occasion a "milestone of shame" for studios as the two sides remain deadlocked.

Since early May, the Writers Guild of America walkout has brought countless film shoots and productions to a halt, costing the California economy millions of dollars each day, but the two sides have barely spoken.

The chaos wrought on the entertainment industry only deepened last month, when writers were joined on the picket lines by the far larger Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA).

"The refusal to take writers' reasonable proposals seriously has caused the WGA strike to last 100 days and counting; it serves only as a milestone of shame" for the studios, the WGA told AFP.

The studios "are wholly responsible for the over three-month shutdown of the industry and the pain it has caused workers and all others whose livelihoods depend on this business," said a union statement.

Writers and actors are demanding better pay and residuals, guarantees over the future use of artificial intelligence, and other working conditions.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Alia Bhatt had been weighing her Hollywood options for a few years. A popular star of Hindi films for over a decade with nearly 79 million Instagram followers, she’d been interested in making an English-language film, but nothing had been working out. Then Bhatt got word of a new action franchise led and produced by Gal Gadot and within a week of reading the script, the deal had closed. It was, she concluded, fate.