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Alberto Barbera presided over a lengthy press conference Tuesday morning, when he announced the stacked lineup for this year’s Venice Film Festival, which runs August 27-September 6.

The lineup is expansive, with big names and arthouse darlings sprinkled across the festival’s strands, even including the shorts program.

High-profile titles include Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny. Roberts leads the cast as a college professor who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star student (Edebiri) levels an accusation against one of her colleagues (Garfield), and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come into the light. The film will screen Out of Competition on Guadagnino and Amazon MGM Studios’ request, Barbera explained during the presser.

Elsewhere, in Competition we have Jay Kelly, the latest film Noah Baumbach has made for Netflix. The...

In films like Suzhou River and Saturday Fiction, Lou Ye nests his political criticisms within the protective comfort of self-reflexive narrative structures. The films’ meta-cinematic qualities—say, an old theater as both an espionage headquarters and a place of political spectacle—offer a manageable distance from reality while also creating a mesh netting for the real world to seep in. Lou’s scathing critiques—of political corruption and personal complicity—emerge through the gradual corrosion of the artificiality of his narrative frameworks.

An Unfinished Film provides no such buffer from reality, nor does it employ stylized fiction as a conduit to real life, as Lou just aims dead on for it. The Covid-19 pandemic is still recent history, and, to some degree, Lou employing his own history in the form of outtakes from films like Spring Fever and Mystery for Xiaorui’s (Mao Xiaorui) movie within the movie is relatively...

Director Lou Ye has sparked the ire of the Chinese government for capturing niche stories onscreen; perhaps the biggest backlash came from his docu-fiction feature “An Unfinished Film.”

The aptly-titled film follows a director as he tries to resume shooting of a film he had abandoned 10 years earlier. The only catch? The filmmaker Xiaorui is trying to go into production in Wuhan, China during the January 2020 lockdown. It wasn’t a great place to be.

Qin Hao, Qi Xi, Huang Xuan, Liang Ming, and Zhang Songwen also star.

“Suzhou River” and “Summer Palace” director Lou helms the feature that blends fact with a fictional narrative. The real footage uses images that were banned or blocked by the government, creating a hybrid docudrama that captured the early days of the Chinese lockdown. Lou and Ma Yingli cowrote the script.

The official synopsis reads: “Set in January 2020, the film follows director Xiaorui...

The “Best is Yet to Come” is based on the life of Han Fudong, a young journalist who exposed the fact that the social stigma against people suffering from hepatitis B in China was actually indoctrinated in the system. Considering that the sickness is endemic in China, and that in 2003 around 100 million people had it, the story resulted in a scandal which also made its author a kind of a star reporter in the country. The movie however, focuses more on his story up to that point.

“The Best is Yet to Come” is screening at Asian Pop Up Cinema

In that fashion, it begins by showing Han Dong, the protagonist, a high school dropout, trying to get an interview at a newspaper in a job fair, but being completely neglected due to his lack of credentials and experience. The life of both him and his girlfriend, Xiao Zhu, is...

In 1995, a large armed robbery occurred in Guangdong. A bank cash truck was robbed by five armed robbers, causing a loss of $15 million and three bank’s escorts were killed. The incident shocked the whole country, the Police immediately set up a task force, led by Wang Shouyue (played by Lam Ka Tung) and He Lan (played by Zhang Songwen), and quickly found the whereabouts of the five robbers, except the real mastermind behind the case, the owner of a construction company, Chen Xinwen (played by Da Peng), and his cousin Chen Xinnian (played by Sun Yang). Chen Xinwen and Chen Xinnian embarked on the road to escape and has since evaporated. Twenty-one years later, the case has long faded from the public, and Wang Shouyue also retired. However, a usual video with a blurred figure rekindled his hope of solving the case. He went to the border city to...

The latest film from the director of ‘Farewell My Concubine’ will be released in China in late September.

Fortissimo Films has secured international rights to Chinese war epic The Volunteers: To The War by Chen Kaige, the acclaimed director of Farewell My Concubine and The Battle At Lake Changjin.

The Amsterdam and Beijing-based sales company will launch sales on the feature at the Asian Contents and Film Market in Busan next month, following its release in China on September 28. The international sales agreement excludes North America, Australia and New Zealand.

The film, previously known as The Great War, is the...

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer climbed to $47.2 million in China over the weekend, continuing a better-than-expected run in the world’s second-biggest box office territory. But the blockbuster biopic ceded first place to Chinese crime thriller Dust to Dust, which came on strong with a $22.2 million two-day opening starting Saturday, topping Oppenheimer‘s $9.6 million Friday-to-Sunday total, according to data from box office tracker Artisan Gateway.

Chinese ticketing app Maoyan forecasts Oppenheimer will finish its local run with approximately $57 million, which will make it the fourth-biggest U.S. film release in China in 2023 behind Fast X ($139.5 million), Meg 2: The Trench ($116.5 million, but a China co-production) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($86.9 million).

Despite its long runtime and weighty historical subject matter — which many analysts expected would be a drag in China — Oppenheimer has been boosted by a rave local reception. On the influential fan platform Douban, it has received nearly...

In the end, it was always going to come down to those youngsters.

China’s First International Film Festival, which has now 17 editions, prided itself on providing a platform on which the county’s next generation of filmmakers can reveal their talent. Fittingly, then, the event is attended by a predominantly young audience. They travel in large numbers to the city of Xining, set in China’s mountainous central region, fringing the Tibetan Plateau, and they really do feast on the program of independent films.

There were 98 films screened across the festival’s nine-day run, 27 features and 71 shorts among them. There were Q&a sessions with the audience that often ran well into overtime, such was the enthusiasm shown for everything from a gritty but life-affirming three-hour drama about a migrant woman trying to forge a life in a big city (Qin Tian’s Fate of the Moonlight) to a...

The Shanghai International Film Festival, China’s most prestigious movie industry event, kicks off its 30th-anniversary edition Friday night. It will be the first version of the festival that’s easily accessible to the global film community since 2019, after the past three editions were either canceled or rendered difficult to attend by strict Covid-19 travel restrictions at the time.

This year, film stars from at home and afar will descend on China’s commercial capital to celebrate the ongoing comeback of China’s movie business. Jason Statham will lend some Hollywood star power to the proceedings when he walks the red carpet for the festival’s opening ceremony Friday night in promotion of his upcoming Warner Bros. blockbuster sequel, Meg 2: The Trench, which opens Aug. 4 and co-stars Chinese leading man Wu Jing. European film legend, Jerzy Skolimowski of Poland — who wrote Roman Polansky’s landmark Knife in the Water...

In 2013, after a riot in a redevelopment district in Guangzhou, the Construction Committee Director Tang Yijie (Zhang Songwen) is found murdered. A young police detective Yang Jiadong (Jing Boran) is tasked with the investigation and soon discovers the involvement of the town´s real estate tycoon Jiang Zicheng (Qin Hao), Tang’s long-suffering wife Lin (Song Jia) who also turns out to be Jiang’s lover, and Tang’s daughter Xiaonuo (Ma Sichun). A cold case from several years ago concerning the mysterious disappearance of Lian Ahyun (Michelle Chen), who was known to Tang and Jiang, seems to be the missing link. Soon Yang finds himself framed, suspended from duty and on the run in Hong Kong…

A 2018 Chinese crime mystery directed by Lou Ye who is renowned for his controversial movies Suzhou River (2000) and Summer Palace (2006). The Shadow Play made its world premiere at the 58th Taipei Golden Horse...

History struggles to come alive in the mainland Chinese WWII spy thriller “Saturday Fiction,” a poorly lit memory play about a doomed espionage mission involving a famous Chinese actress (Gong Li) and a prominent Japanese military official (Joe Odagiri).

Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this sleepy and visually murky black-and-white drama belabors the same banal truisms about memory and role-playing during wartime –basically, it’s impossible to maintain your autonomy when you’re only a pawn in a complicated game — and tends to be more interesting to think about than to watch.

Filmed with stifling hand-held photography, many scenes plod along in real time without a momentous or compelling pace. The sound design’s focus on background noises, instead of a musical score, also soon becomes more irritating than intriguing. Gong and Odagiri do what they can with a generally thin scenario, inspired by...

"Our duty is to report the facts accurately." A festival promo trailer has debuted for a Chinese indie drama titled The Best Is Yet To Come, marking the feature directorial debut of filmmaker Jing Wang. This is premiering at the Venice Film Festival this month, then will play at the Toronto Film Festival. Set in Beijing in 2003. Society is restless with excitement; everyone is eager to prove themselves. The internet has yet to take over. Newspaper is king. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed journalism intern Han Dong decides to change the fate of 100 million people with a single article. This film is inspired by true events. Jing Wang worked as an assistant director for Jia Zhangke for years, who states that "[Jing Wang's] perspective on the world is determined and twofold: the change of the world depends on the efforts of every individual, and the vitality of cinema lies in the continuation of consciousness.

Frank de Boer strides. The ball lazily at his feet with direction. Suddenly vision. A long, fifty metre pass. The right foot of Dennis Bergkamp in the Argentina penalty area. Control. Dead. The second touch. The ball bounces behind behind Roberto Ayala. The right foot scoops. The ball curves passed Carlos Roa. The net bulges. The arms raised.

Twenty years on from that Bergkamp goal and France’s destruction of Brazil in the 1998 World Cup final, all eyes are on Russia to see who will capture football’s greatest prize. Quan Zhou’s debut feature looks back at the summer of ’98 and the developing friendship between a young boy and his elderly and lonely neighbour in a small Chinese town, with the odd football reference thrown in.

End of Summer is screening at the 17th New York Asian Film Festival

Xiaoyang (Zishan Rong) is a boy popular at school, naturally...