Movie News

Even with the rise of premium subscription video and audio services, content with ads still holds nearly 60 share of the total time U.S. audiences spend consuming entertainment, according to a new study.

In fact, according to the latest quarterly Entertainment 365 study from research firm Luminate, having an ad-free experience isn’t the main driver for premium subscriptions. The top two factors for premium subscriptions are getting a good value for the price and having a variety of content, according to the Luminate study. The survey also found that almost one-third of all Americans say they have “cut the cord” — that is, they have canceled cable or satellite TV.

Looking at total entertainment time, U.S. consumers spend 74 on visual entertainment and 26 on audio options, per the Luminate study. Americans spend 88 of their entertainment dollars on visual content, versus 12 on audio.

Formerly known as P-mrc Data, Luminate is owned through

Some 70 roles have been made redundant as Casey Bloys implements Wbd-led restructure

Warner Bros Discovery has closed HBO Max’s international originals team, which was behind deals such as buying US rights to It’s A Sin, as part of 70 layoffs under chief content officer Casey Bloys.

Bloys, who leads on content for HBO and HBO Max, is overseeing a 14 cut to his programming operations, with senior vice-president of international originals Jeniffer Kim’s team one of the worst hit.

An internal memo from Bloys stated that in light of Wbd’s “sizable international footprint” under international chief Gerhard Zeiler, HBO

Michelle Savill’s poignant film follows a would-be architect pretending to take up a prestigious New York internship without leaving her home town of Wellington

‘Sorry, I’m such a disappointment to you, Mum.” “We can’t all be appointments.” That’s the fumbling, poignant way of this debut comedy-drama from New Zealand director Michelle Savill, clearly a highly personal piece of work in its detailed character study of would-be architect and social-media blagger Millie, played in charmingly evasive style by Ana Scotney.

Millie has a hot ticket from Wellington to New York for an internship at a blue-chip architecture firm, but has a panic attack and disembarks before takeoff. In denial about what’s happened, and unable to admit her failure, she decides to keep up the pretence online, dropping in a cut-and-paste of an airplane window into her Instagram feed (“A new adventure begins!!!!”). And she digs herself in deeper,

“War on the Diamond,” a feature documentary about the only baseball player to die directly of injuries sustained in a game, is set to premiere Nov. 15 on VOD platfoms including iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Vudu.

The doc tells the story of Raymond Chapman, a Cleveland Indians shortstop who was hit in the head by a pitch in a game against the New York Yankees. He died the following day. To mark today’s 102nd anniversary of the fatal game, “War on the Diamond” producers have released a trailer for the documentary from Dark Star Pictures.

“Diamond” is” directed and produced by Andy Billman. It’s based on Mike Sowell’s 1989 book “The Pitch That Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman and the Penant Race of 1920.” Jonathan Taylor Hurley served as director of photographery; Paul Carruthers served as editor.

Billman produced with Art Horan (“The Usual Suspects

The actor said they were suffering ‘complex mental health issues’

Ezra Miller, star of upcoming Warner Bros film The Flash, is seeking treatment for ”complex mental health issues” following multiple arrests and controversies.

The actor, who identifies as non-binary and uses them/they pronouns, first came under fire in 2020 after a video showed them strangling a woman outside of a bar in Iceland.

Miller has since been arrested twice in Hawaii for disorderly conduct and harassment, and was most recently charged with a felony burglary in Vermont following a police investigation.

In a statement to Variety, Miller said: ”Having recently

Documentary directed by Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum.

UK arthouse documentary specialist Dartmouth Films has acquired Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum’s documentary feature Husband, ahead of its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff) today (August 16), for UK and Ireland distribution.

Dartmouth Films acquired the feature from the filmmakers directly. The documentary is competing at Eiff for the Powell and Pressburger award. A theatrical release is planned for the UK and Ireland in autumn.

Co-directors and married couple Appignanesi and Baum attempt to figure out their relationship on screen, involving an angst-riddled trip to the United States, where

Netflix is launching an incubator to help foster female screenwriters in Egypt.

The U.S. streaming giant has partnered with Sard, a dedicated hub for screenwriters in the Arab world on a writing program called Because She Created.

Its stated goal is training twenty women from outside Cairo and to “expose untapped talent to the creative tools and industry insight needed to advance their creative and professional development,” Netflix said in a statement.

The program is financed by the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity.

Sard was founded by award-winning writer Mariam Naoum in 2016 as a space for aspiring screenwriters to improve their writing skills and unleash their creative potential.

Naoum is a prominent Egyptian screenwriter and social activist whose credits include Kamla Abou Zekry’s Cairo-set ensemble film “One/Zero”; and the TV series “A Girl named Zat,” “Heat Wave” and “The Women’s Prison,” a scathing exploration of the Egyptian prison system,

Indian media and entertainment company Eros Media World is entering the Saudi Arabian market via a partnership with Riyadh-headquartered Arabia Pictures Group (Apg).

Apg, a content production outfit, focuses mainly on the Mena region. Eros and Apg will explore strategic and business opportunities in the film production, technology, and Web3 spaces, exclusively catering to the Indian entertainment industry. The two companies are already in the advanced stages of testing movie archive digitization and virtual location scouting technologies.

The partnership aims to tap into Vision 2030, the Saudi Arabian government’s strategic framework to move away from Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil to diversify its economy and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation, media and tourism, which is driven by the country’s General Entertainment Authority.

Bollywood films have been playing well in Saudi ever since Akshay Kumar’s “Gold” became the first Bollywood title released

The latest’s TV and film projects shooting in the UK and Ireland.

Screen reveals a snapshot of the latest high-end TV and film productions shooting in the UK and Ireland for the big studios and streamers. Please contact us here to add or update changes to the following or new productions taking place in the UK.

Films

Timestalker

The metaphysical rom-com follows Agnes who is reincarnated every time she falls in love with the wrong man.

Dir: Alice Lowe

Where: Cardiff

When: September

Production companies: Western Edge Pictures;

Distributor: HanWay Films

Cast: Alice Lowem, Jacob Anderson, Sam Riley, Natasia Demetriou

Music-biz drama featuring Hong Kong pop stars Keung To and Jer Lau bids for cross-generational appeal but gets lost in cliches

Hotly awaited as the big screen debut for pop idols Keung To and Jer Lau, members of the boyband sensation Mirror, Kearen Pang’s sophomore effort has a cross-generational appeal, as it revolves around the challenges faced by a housewife’s return to the workforce.

After giving up a successful career as a record company executive to raise a family, Mei-fung (Teresa Mo) grows dissatisfied with a marriage that is falling apart, and a distant relationship with her hardworking but reticent 17-year-old son Jonathan (Jer Lau). Thanks to her past contacts, Mei-fung gingerly steps back into the entertainment world, as she starts working at a small arts centre for kids. A chance encounter with Fong Ching (Keung To), a young delivery guy with killer moves and an angelic voice,

Comedies don’t come much more unconventional than “Nude Tuesday.”

The brainchild of Arma?an Ballantyne and Jackie van Beek — who also stars as Laura, one half of a couple who attend a new-age retreat run by sex-guru Bjorg Rassmussen (Jemaine Clement) to rekindle their marriage — it was filmed in a made-up language and then subtitled after the fact by Julia Davis. The cult comedy veteran’s prose is a frequently hilarious interpretation of the cast’s performances.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s U.K. premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff), Davis recalls why she agreed to the subtitling gig before she even saw the movie.

“I was a big fan of Jackie’s from a film she did called ‘The Breaker Upperers.’ We had a mutual fan type of thing going between us where we were emailing each other,” says Davis. “But then Jackie just emailed me and said,

Inaugural Meta Cinema Forum Africa takes place in November.

The opportunities for cinema investors and film distributors in Africa were outlined yesterday (August 16) at the press launch for Meta Cinema Forum Africa, which is due to take place in Accra, Ghana from November 21-23.

Meta Cinema Forum Africa is billed as a gathering of cinema investors, film distributors, cinema developers and policy makers to explore opportunities in cinema infrastructure development on the African continent. It will offer a conference, exhibition and film content market.

The National Film Authority (Nfa) of Ghana has partnered with UAE-based event specialist Great Minds Group

Doc is directed by French-Italian filmmaker Giulia Amati.

Leipzig-based documentary sales outfit Deckert Distribution has taken on world sales duties for Venetian Nights selection Kristos - The Last Child, directed by French-Italian filmmaker Giulia Amati.

The observational film is set on a remote island in Greece’s Dodecanese which has only 30 inhabitants including Kristos, its last remaining child. He is the one pupil at the local school and about to start his final year of elementary school. To finish compulsory education, he needs to leave Arki and move to a larger island. His family can’t afford the expense and

Ukrainian documentary “Dad’s Lullaby” and Romania’s “Between Revolutions” won the Docu Talent Awards, chosen from a field of nine documentary features from Central and Eastern Europe, at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Monday.

The Docu Talent Award for the most promising project went to “Dad’s Lullaby”, directed and produced by Lesia Diak. It tells the story of a Ukrainian veteran who returns home burnt out and traumatized from war but hoping to find peace for himself and his family. The jury described it as “a heartfelt depiction of a life under impossible circumstances,” adding: “Such a personal story is a valuable way to understand the scars of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.”

The DAFilms.com Distribution Award, which covers international VOD release for two years on DAFilms.com, went to “Between Revolutions”, which is directed by Vlad Petri and produced by Monica L?zurean-Gorgan. The archive-constructed film tells

The Story Circle programme is for female screenwriters and filmmakers from East Africa.

Edinburgh International Film Festival (Eiff) has revealed the four winners of The Story Circle programme – an initiative aimed at female screenwriters and filmmakers from East Africa, who have an idea for a short film.

Janet Nsabuwera (Uganda), Sarah Kyomugisha (Uganda), Lydia Matata (Kenya) and Hope Wanjiku (Kenya) are the four winners. They will be given support to develop and produce their short films over the next year, to be screened at Eiff in 2023.

The brand new programme forms part of Eiff’s 75th anniversary celebration activity, and

The company has also shut down its Bird Box Film Development arm.

Three of the subsidiary companies of Kirsty Bell’s family-owned media outfit Goldfinch have gone out of business.

Goldfinch confirmed this week that Bird Box Distribution Ltd, the company set up to assist with film sales and distribution strategy in the UK, has ceased trading.

UK streaming platform BirdBox.Film, launched in May 2020, has also been shuttered, “as it was no longer viable as a business venture for us,” according to a company spokesperson.

A third entity, Bird Box Film Development Ltd, an Seis (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme

Charming ‘bulldozer’ Ana?s sprints after emotional stimulants in breezy tale of graduate student who seduces her publisher’s partner

An amusing snapshot of millennial restlessness, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s droll debut is another addition to the recent crop of films where young women are always running on screen, a lot. Lamented by an ex-boyfriend as a “bulldozer”, Ana?s (Ana?s Demoustier) saunters into every human interaction with the force of a whirlwind. Forever pacing back and forth, she goes off on idiosyncratic tangents as if oblivious to the bewildered other party.

Such personality quirks in large doses could soon turn tiresome and narcissistic if not for Demoustier’s effervescent charm. A graduate student who perpetually dodges the deadlines of her doctoral thesis, Ana?s is averse to commitment, to the challenge of buckling down and concluding things; she is constantly searching for the next emotional stimulant. After a disappointing tryst with Daniel (Denis Podalydès

Having failed to cut it in the city, mild-mannered Romanian cop Ilie takes a lower-pressure job as a police chief in a rural village near the Moldovan border. Expecting a quieter, easier life of mostly benign duties, he instead encounters even more violence and moral rot than he did before. That he’s surprised suggests Ilie (played by Iulian Postelnicu with a permanent woebegone grimace) hasn’t spent much time watching his own country’s cinema. An exceedingly mordant comedy that gradually bleeds out to tragedy, Paul Negoescu’s “Men of Deeds” is another Romanian exercise in finding personal and institutional corruption under every upturned stone, behind every unlocked small-town door, in every heavily conditional handshake. Audiences won’t be nearly as startled, but it’s bleakly compelling all the same.

Back in 2016, Negoescu scored a major homegrown hit in Romania with his jaunty, shambolic crowdpleaser “Two Lottery Tickets,” a

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Better Call Saul” Season 6, Episode 13, “Saul Gone.”]

The final season of “Better Call Saul” has seen both death and resurrection. There’s a growing body count that’s been offset by a handful of reappearances, of characters either presumed or confirmed dead, in the life of a notorious defense lawyer on the lam. These weekly reviews have made definitive statements that a certain persona was all but cooked. They’ve also teetered on the brink of making assumptions that his one-time partner was all but marked for a death of her own.

So it’s only fitting that the series finale many assumed would carry physical and emotional carnage (as its predecessor show fit into its final hour) offers one last zig in the face of expected zags. “Saul Gone,” written and directed by showrunner Peter Gould, isn’t solely a parting tale of rebirth. But it certainly offers more

In their first statement since legal issues began, non-binary actor says they have begun treatment for ‘complex mental health issues’

Actor Ezra Miller has broken their silence amid a growing list of legal issues and allegations of erratic behaviour, saying they are seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues”.

In a statement provided by a representative of the actor to Variety on Tuesday, the 29-year-old non-binary actor apologised for any alarm they may have caused.