One of the hottest under-the-radar titles to emerge out of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival was Dubrovnik-born filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s feature debut “Murina.” The film came to the Directors’ Fortnight with the imprimatur of executive producer Martin Scorsese and came out winning the Camera d’Or, the festival’s top prize for a first feature. With those recommendations, it’s baffling to find a murky, vaguely sinister, but ultimately dreary coming-of-age film about a young woman’s blossoming sexuality under the spell of her mother’s old flame....

Deadline adds that “the first picture will begin shooting June 28 in Greece, and casting will begin immediately.” The “Knives Out” deal gives Netflix a new franchise to call its own. The first “Knives Out” was distributed by Lionsgate in November 2019 and became a word-of-mouth box office sensation, grossing $311 million worldwide. It’s increasingly rare for an original property to breakout at the box office in such a big way, so it was no surprise when in February 2020 the news came that Johnson and Craig were moving forward with “Knives Out 2....

In its absence (and without any other wide opening), the three day total will come to only $35 million. That makes it the weakest weekend since May 21-23 last year, just before “A Quiet Place II” opened and theaters started seeing steady improvement. This is how low a number this is – the last time the lowest gross of a year for a weekend was less than twice as much was in 2014....

Five years ago, Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s “The Distinguished Citizen” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It was one of the sharpest and funniest comedy-dramas of the year, and its star, Oscar Martinez, won the festival’s acting prize, the Cuppa Volpi. But it didn’t get much of a release in English-speaking countries. (Track it down now, folks.) The follow-up from the Argentinian directing team, “Official Competition” is more likely to be seen by audiences around the world....

“Grease” casting director Joel Thurm revealed that Travolta suggested Newton-John play Sandy, the happy-go-lucky new girl who had a summer fling with Travolta’s Danny Zucko. “John was already pre-set, and John asked me, ‘What do you think of Olivia?’ I said, ‘She’s wonderful.’ He said, ‘What do you think of her for Sandy? That’s a great idea,’” Thurm told People. “And once John said that, and that’s who John wanted, I stopped anything else....

As theatrical exhibition is still impacted by the pandemic this year, today’s announcement reaffirms that “eligibility requirements for the 94th Academy Awards will be consistent with the addendums made for the 93rd Awards season,” which include both those expanded theatrical cities and streaming rules (films that planned for a theatrical release but pivoted to streaming or PVOD remain eligible). While the Academy provided no other new details, today’s announcement also includes a notation that it “intends to expand the qualifying requirements for the 95th Awards....

For this love quadrangle involving three women and one man, Audiard co-writes the film with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” filmmaker Céline Sciamma as well as screenwriter Léa Mysius. The cast includes “Portrait” star Noémie Merlant as Nora, Lucie Zhang as Emilie, Makita Samba as Camille, and Jehnny Beth as Amber, all moving pieces in a chessboard of erotic entanglements. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote out of the Cannes Film Festival last year that “Paris, 13th District” “marries the weightlessness of ‘Manhattan’ with the serendipity of ‘Chungking Express,’” as “Audiard traces a brave new world in which youngish people struggle to build meaningful relationships from connections that are founded upon quicksand....

“Decision to Leave” is a romantic murder mystery that follows a detective (Park Hye-il of Bong Joon Ho’s “The Host” and “Memories of Murder”) who falls for a mysterious widow (Tang Wei of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” and Michael Mann’s “Blackhat”) after she becomes the number one suspect in his latest murder investigation. The supporting cast includes Go Kyung-pyo, Park Yong-woo, and Lee Jung-hyun, the latter of whom starred in Park Chan-wook’s 2011 horror short “Night Fishing....

Let the speculation begin! Bettany wouldn’t drop any hints of the actor or the character the actor is playing, but whoever it turns out to be will be sharing “pretty intense” scenes opposite Bettany’s character, Vision. “So many things get leaked, but there’s this thing that has been completely under wrap that happens,” Bettany said, expressing excitement over the spoiler remaining a secret so far. “I work with this actor that I’ve always wanted to work with and we have fireworks together, the scenes are great and I think people are going to be really excited....

Sight & Sound voters selected Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” as this decade’s greatest film of all time. It is the fourth film to ever receive the honor, after “Bicycle Thieves,” “Citizen Kane,” and “Vertigo.” But Paul Schrader isn’t sold on the pick. The “Master Gardener” director took to his always colorful Facebook page to question the logic of the selection and question if the poll’s voters were committed to judging films by their artistic value....

The Entertainment category includes TV series “Hacks,” “Dopesick,” “Pen15,” “Only Murders in the Building,” and “Yellowjackets,” as well as the Netflix comedy special “Bo Burnham: Inside” among the contenders. Meanwhile, the Documentaries segment features “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” HBO Max’s “Exterminate All the Brutes,” and the Oscar-winning short documentary “The Queen of Basketball,” executive produced by Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry. Meanwhile, Academy Award Best Documentary winner “Summer of Soul…Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised” is nominated in a Peabody category of its own, winning the Arts segment automatically....

“I think people will be surprised by the series for two reasons,” Jackson said. “One, it’ll be far more intimate than they imagined it to be, because everyone is used to seeing music documentaries being a bit kind of MTV-ish, sort of together in a poppy kind of way and it’s just the music, music, music, you know? The music isn’t at the forefront of this film: weirdly, it’s what goes on behind the music at the forefront....

That’s a message Valerie Taylor, now 85, has been trying to dispel ever since. It’s a regret Australian documentarian Sally Aitken captures in her new film about Taylor’s life, “Playing with Sharks,” a NatGeo-ready documentary that mixes some of the most beautiful images you’ll ever see with a talking head-filled structure too pedestrian for so extraordinary a subject. An achievement in editing together superlative archive footage, “Playing with Sharks” owes its beauty almost entirely to Valerie and Ron, who was usually the one behind the camera as this husband-and-wife team dove into coral reefs, kelp forests, and all manner of shark breeding grounds....

Per the Wall Street Journal, Cineworld, the owner of Regal Cinemas, has met with lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis LLP and consultants from AlixPartners to advise on the bankruptcy process. Cineworld is expected to file a Chapter 11 petition in the U.S. and is considering filing for insolvency in the U.K. Since the rise of streaming and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cineworld has been open about low admission rates affecting business....

“There’s a reason every movie lover in L.A. is in mourning,” Rian Johnson told the Los Angeles Times in a statement. “If you lived in this town and loved movies, you’ve had life-changing experiences in that complex. But more than that, it’s easy to forget how the ArcLight completely transformed the moviegoing experience: assigned seating, plush comfy chairs, no late entry to screenings, these were all considered wild and crazy ideas when they first opened…....

“Oh, women!,” Gervais said in the special. “Not all women, I mean the old-fashioned ones. The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs. Those fucking dinosaurs. I love the new women. They’re great, aren’t they? The new ones we’ve been seeing lately. The ones with beards and cocks. They’re as good as gold, I love them. And now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh, they want to use our toilets.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they use your toilets?...

Some of Deakins’ photos are now being printed for the very first time in “Byways,” a book due out next week from Damiani. Deakins has rarely shown his photographs publicly and this marks the first time they’ve been published as a collection. Deakins likens his photography to a sketchbook, something “very personal.” Still, his command of light and eye for composition is as evident in his snapshots as it is in his cinematography....

Over 48 episodes, what this show did have was Room 104 itself, a drab four-wall set — and a blank canvas for anyone lucky enough to get the chance to play inside. Whether the storytellers that came through used that vague premise as an experiment, a challenge, or a chance to tell a story that could only exist within those confines, each new chapter was worth watching to see which path it took....

There are few things more cloaked in doom than a person in a found footage story turning a camera on themselves and feeling optimistic. It comes with the genre territory that there’s a reason we’re watching whatever this will become, and that reason is something other than “this person continued to have a good time.” Such is the case with the “Room 104” episode “Itchy,” Episode 3 of the HBO series’ Season 3, which originally aired in 2019....

Assets include writings of famed film critic Pauline Kael, whose biting insights on film are often hard to find on the internet, the story of pioneering aquatic star Annette Kellerman, what critics said about the world’s first feature-length film “The Story of the Kelly Gang” from 1906, and the story of the Lon Chaney monster that inspired Jennifer Kent’s cult classic “The Babadook.” Kael fans will enjoy her updated insights on “Lawrence of Arabia”: “The most literate and intelligent and tasteful and the most beautiful of the modem expensive spectacle films....