I might be misremembering it, but there's one shot in Nice Dreams that sticks out in my mind on a formal level: a long, static take with Stacy Keach in the background, climbing the wall in part-iguana mode, while a couple of guys sitting in the foreground (possibly including Cheech and/or Chong and/or Michael Winslow)…

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Only the last two came out in China and they made about $20 million each, which still qualified China as their third-biggest market (after the U.S. and Japan) but isn't impressive by Chinese standards. But Retribution was hurt by a lengthy delay due to the anti-Japanese protests in 2012, which resulted in the movie…

Then of course, there's the planned sequel? continuation? reboot? of the American version, have they filmed that yet? I want to say … maybe … ? I think it's due out in 2017, was supposed to be this year … perhaps.

La Chinoise is one of my favorite Godards, and definitely the one I rewatch most often. I think it's because I sympathize with people who have a certain vision but lack the chops or the strength of their own convictions to pull it off. So here, they just hang around the apartment all day daubing the walls with slogans…

I didn't know it had left. It's still showing here in three first-run theaters.

I get the theory behind this (and am personally indifferent at best to Almodóvar). But a lot of the lesser-known filmmakers the Academy plumps for instead of more established names quite frankly deserve to be lesser known—not to mention a lot of those established names were ignored by the Academy when they were…

Your Name opened in Japan in August, so April would mean an eight-month delay. That's not really so extreme for the U.S.; consider how Thomas Vinterberg's The Commune (which opened in Denmark last January) doesn't have a release date here despite getting picked up by Magnolia in September. Julieta is an Almodóvar film…

Agree on the Mancini score. I'll also say that Sam Peckinpah was dead wrong to want "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" out of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

I don't think most national awards groups bother with the "national selection committee" nonsense—I know that the BAFTAs and the Césars don't. As noted in the article, the AMPAS policy results in movies getting rejected because they're not judged sufficiently "national" to qualify as a submission from such-and-such…

I think it's lower-tier Jarmusch but it's still good. It's like Night on Earth in that it's basically an anthology film but more cohesive than Coffee and Cigarettes (though not as much fun). I love Screamin' Jay Hawkins' performance. It's also not hard to track down unless you live in Antigua or somewhere—you can rent…

All this glorification of dangerous adventure is very dispiriting for those of us who prefer to have our adventures from the couch.

Well, if you're talking physical formats, then DVD is it. South Park is the only series Comedy Central still bothers to release on Blu-ray—even Workaholics is DVD-only now despite the first five seasons getting Blu versions as well.

With Once Upon a Time in China II, Woo’s old frienemy Tsui Hark returned Jet Li to his iconic role as Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-Hong, and he also gave the world the screen debut of Donnie Yen…

Gotta be a Cannes premiere. That's four days after the festival opens.

Emerald City is also an example of a distinctly TV phenomenon: Call it George R.R. Martinizing, the process of converting existing legends and fantasy properties into Game of Thrones-style war-and-sex epics.

I'm the kind of person who likes to see all of the corporate/institutional logos at the end, like European movies co-produced by TV networks and government entities from nine different countries, or the Chinese movies with 37 "official promotional partners."

Nothing against these picks but I like credits that just do goofy stuff with the text. The Ichi the Killer credits are almost unreadable because they cross the screen both vertically and horizontally and intersect each other, and I also like credits that are just one solid wall of text (The Boss of It All is the the…

If he weren’t working once again with Ding Sheng (Police Story: Lockdown), a mainland director who seems to get progressively worse at pacing and structure with every film.

Railroad Tigers is ostensibly based on a novel from the '50s (translated into English as The Railway Guerrillas) that was itself ostensibly based on an actual wartime guerrilla unit. The novel is still pretty well known and has already had a bunch of adaptations, including a 1956 movie, at least three TV series, a…