Updated every Friday 12:00 PM
September 4 - September 10

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Apple TV revealed a first look and premiere date for the highly anticipated second season of "The Sisters Grimm," premiering globally on Friday, October 2. Based on Michael Buckley's New York Times bestselling book series, "The Sisters Grimm" is a journey of adventure and heart about sleuth-solving sisters descended from the Brothers Grimm who, while very different, make a pretty great team. Season one earned a 100 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes...

It's no longer unusual for a hit movie to come from outside the Hollywood system, with upstart player Angel Studios scoring with Sound of Freedom three years ago, or Taylor Swift going directly to AMC Theatres for her blockbuster Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie. Now AMC Entertainment is launching a new distribution company to allow movies without traditional distributors to run on its screens. The new label, titled Leawood Films, will distribute and market films for established and emerging filmmakers. But unlike The Eras Tour, starring the biggest musician in the world, the company is not necessarily aiming for blockbusters, and will instead focus on small and medium sized films. It will be genre agnostic — not just focusing on concert films or low budget horror, ala Obsession. AMC believes that in addition to its own screens, it will convince other theater owners to carry the films as well. Since the pandemic and the dual labor strikes of 2023 upended production, theater owners have complained about a lack of new films to show, and this is intended to help address that gap, with the company making pains to state it will not interfere with showing movie studios' films...

The Venice Film Festival has become synonymous with the Oscar launch. If you have a movie with awards season pretensions — think La La Land, The Shape of Water, Poor Things or The Brutalist — you take it to the Lido. This year feels different. Politics, not awards campaigns, has taken center stage. Venice's 83rd edition is packed with films focused on right-wing media moguls and the crackdown on immigration, on the conflicts in Israel, Iran and Russia, on the abuses of capitalism and the rise of authoritarian power. The lineup, according to artistic director Alberto Barbera, is Venice's "most political ever." It all kicks off with Ink, Danny Boyle's opening-night drama about Rupert Murdoch and his 1969 acquisition of The Sun, the tabloid whose combination of sex-scandal sensationalism and right-wing populism became the playbook for the New York Post and Fox News. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, with Jack O'Connell as Sun editor Larry Lamb. It continues with Musk, Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary profile of the world's wealthiest person, right-wing agitator and troll, which Elon Musk — sight unseen — has already decried on X as a "hit piece"; and They're Here, a short doc "horror film" from Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), made with Rachel Lauren Mueller, which looks at ICE's crackdown in Minneapolis and includes previously undisclosed footage. That's just the opening act. Politics are everywhere in the lineup, with films examining the wars and occupations reshaping the Middle East, ones tracing the authoritarian drift across the former Soviet sphere, and those focused on capitalism buckling under its own contradictions. The Middle East material is everywhere. An Iranian doctor whose life is dismantled by the Tehran regime anchors A Bit of Light from Ali Asgari, whose Divine Comedy won the Venice Horizons Award last year. In Citizen Osama, Ahmed Hassouna profiles a photojournalist navigating survival and fatherhood in besieged Gaza. Muayad Alayan's Conversation With the Sea follows a Palestinian man caught in Israeli bureaucracy, while Road to Jericho, a documentary from Israeli director Amos Gitai, tracks the fate of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin hamlet outside Jerusalem on the verge of being erased...

Despite a passionate Bay Area film culture, San Francisco has been hit hard over the last 15 years by iconic arthouse and first-run movie theater closures. From the Landmark-owned Embarcadero Center complex shuttering in 2023 to AMC taking over the beloved indie Sundance Kabuki in Japantown 10 years ago, venue attrition has empowered newer but more commercial hotspots like the Mission District's Alamo Drafthouse to thrive. More recently, the once-doomed Castro Theatre finally reopened as a movie palace this year before nearly becoming just another live event space in a historic building. But as announced on Thursday, a new exhibition hub is set to open in SF's famed Mission District this fall: The nonprofit, single-screen The Portal Cinema will live at 3293 Mission Street, where it's currently under construction on a previously vacant commercial lot. The theater will showcase new global releases, repertory works, special programs, and more, and will be equipped to screen archive-only 35mm and 16mm prints, along with digital formats. The Portal Cinema marks the first new movie theater built in San Francisco in more than a decade, according to its backers...

It may be couched in a whole lot of rants about California and Hollywood and making America Great Again, but President Trump has come out in support of something a lot of people in Hollywood have been clamoring for across years: a federal film tax credit. In a post on Truth Social that is as rambling and full of random capitalization and personal screeds as anything else he generally posts, President Trump endorsed the idea of a tax credit to help more films be shot in America and called on a bipartisan group of politicians to support a plan. "I am going to suggest that Republicans and Democrats get together and immediately craft Legislation to save the Movie, Television, and Entertainment Business in America. Congress should approve, immediately, a Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America," he wrote. Trump said his desire to finally support a federal film incentive came from a meeting with Jon Voight, who was one of Trump's "ambassadors" on the issue. Voight previously released some thoughts when Trump originally talked about tariffs on the film industry, but little of specific substance has happened since then. Rivkin however did hint an incentive could be coming at CinemaCon, and the feeling was that while people like California Senator Adam Schiff had been beating the drum for one, Republicans were largely waiting on Trump's say so before plowing ahead...

Since it premiered just over a year ago at last year's Telluride Film Festival, mainstream distributors and streamers wouldn't touch the documentary "Ask E. Jean," which profiles advice columnist E. Jean Carroll amid her legal battle for defamation with President Trump. The film's director Ivy Meeropol outwardly has blamed "The Trump Effect" for why buyers have "ghosted" her in getting the film released. So Meeropol has turned to some unconventional measures. Over the last several months, "Ask E. Jean" has played in over 100 theaters across the country and sold out New York's IFC Center, leading to a five-week engagement of the film in NY, as well as additional theatrical screenings in over 90 cities and 30 states as part of a rollout via Abramorama. The audience demand has been there, even if other distributors have feared the commercial prospects of a political documentary or quite simply feared retribution from the Trump administration. But it has done so via the joint efforts of five different companies whom have all come together to help distribute it through more grassroots means: Flora Films and Impact Partners, which produced and financed "Ask E. Jean," Theorem Media, an indie film distribution studio, took on the non-theatrical and eventized theatrical distribution and organic social, Roco Films, which has led educational access for schools, colleges, and students, and Kinema, which is a platform that gives communities the means to host their own screenings and viewing parties. The companies don't normally release films together, but this one was special...