Tag: film festival

By Peter Debruge According To The variety Flying high in one of the world’s most male-dominated film industries, Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu follows up her acclaimed 2017 drama “Angels Wear White” with the almost-good “Girls on Wires.” Focused on the uneasy reunion between two estranged cousins who team up to beat the cycle of drug abuse and debt that’s been dragging their family down for decades, this is ambitious, moral-minded cinema for a mainstream Chinese audience, and as such, it seems only fair to forgive the kind of hammy acting and manipulative melodrama Americans accept from Clint Eastwood and Tyler Perry movies. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned in the way Qu tries to move viewers, using flashbacks to memories between cutie-pie kiddos Fang Di and T...

By John Hopewell According To The variety Mexico’s Talipot Studio, a co-producer on Ruben Östlund’s triple Oscar nominee “Triangle of Sadness,” has boarded “Malinche,” a historical epic produced by Spain’s Morena Films and directed by Pablo Trapero (“The Clan,” “ZeroZeroZero”). Prestigious Mexican historian Enrique Krauze also produces.  Shaping up as one of the biggest movies from the Spanish-speaking world this year, “Malinche” is written by Trapero and Daniel Krauze, a writer on “Luis Miguel: The Series It could be described as a conquistador epic, set in 1519 as Hernán Cortes’ troops are supposedly welcomed by Aztec lord Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan. It centers, however, on the figure of Malinche, Cortés’ interpreter and consort who bore him a son.&nbs...

By Gregg Goldstein According To The variety This year marks the 39th annual Teddy Award honors, the longest-running LGBTQ+ prizes at any major film festival. While the Feb. 21 closing ceremony is business as usual for the Berlinale, global events could make this one of the most important years in Teddy history. U.S. President Trump is implementing numerous anti-transgender policies, withdrawing President Biden’s executive order making federal agencies enforce a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that sex discrimination laws include LGBTQ discrimination, and even declaring that there are only two sexes – seemingly oblivious to children born intersex, a plot point in one of this year’s biggest Oscar contenders. His appointee Elon Musk regularly makes anti-trans statements and endorsed Germany’s...