The computer-animated fantasy film “Epic” was the best-selling DVD and Blu-ray title in its first week in release, passing the action movies that dominated the previous week’s rankings.
From superhero movies to techy sitcoms to captains of industry, geeks have been running the show for years.
‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey,’ which will air on Turner Classic Movies, focuses on international cinema. Hollywood is not the center of the cinema universe in film critic-historian Mark Cousins’ acclaimed 15-hour documentary, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” which has its U.S. television premiere Monday evening on Turner Classic Movies.
For the fourth time in eight movies, Pixar replaces a director midstream, this time taking Bob Peterson off ‘The Good Dinosaur.’ Pixar Animation has removed the director of its 2014 film, “The Good Dinosaur,” and not named a replacement, marking the fourth time in eight movies that the Emeryville studio has made a director change midstream. Â Â Â Â
New releases: ‘Kon-Tiki,’ ‘Elementary: The First Season,’ ‘Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder’ and more. The Great Gatsby    Â
The movie about teens who face an army of aliens with help from vampires and zombies is among the few projects to receive a 20% film tax credit from California. Movies starring Vanessa Hudgens, Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner have begun filming in Los Angeles, adding some celebrity sizzle to brisk feature film activity this quarter. Â Â Â Â
The media monitoring group GLAAD says the six major studios released only 14 movies last year that featured lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters. For nearly two decades GLAAD has tracked the presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters on television. Now, the organization is turning its attention to the movies.
The market for animated movies may be nearing a saturation point as audiences confront a growing number of choices, some Hollywood veterans say. When it comes to computer-animated movies, studios seemingly can’t get enough of talking animals, planes, cars, monsters, cavemen, snails and little blue creatures who live in mushrooms. Â Â Â Â
BFI, retail Night and the City is the stand-out title here, a top-quality example of the genre with the unusual feature that the mean streets through which smalltime hustler Richard Widmark plies his trade are the still-familiar ones of postwar London. Like his lead character, Jules Dassin, whose direction is exhilarating, was on the run – from the McCarthy witchhunt in Hollywood. He’s best …
Anchor Bay, rental and retail Produced largely by the same team as the delightful Little Miss Sunshine, this is never as successful or as funny as that surprise hit, but does have the performances of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt to commend it. Not only are these strong and empathetic, but they are playing very much against type: the usually imperious Blunt is the family screw-up, while Adams, sunny …