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June 21 - June 27

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Apple is partnering with Warner Bros. Pictures on the theatrical rollout. The tech giant has been releasing more of its movies in theaters before debuting them on its streaming service Apple TV+ along with other home entertainment platforms. In the past, Apple partnered with the likes of Sony on the release of “Napoleon,” Paramount on “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Universal on “Argylle.” The Formula 1 movie will be shown in Imax theaters, which could become the de facto format for consumers interested in a movie that will be marketed heavily on its racing sequences. The June 2025 release date will pit the film against the opening of “M3GAN 2.0,” a sequel to Blumhouse’s 2023 horror hit, “M3GAN.”...

Pixar made a name for itself by telling original stories through cutting-edge animation. From Pixar's first fully computer-animated feature-length film, Toy Story, to its most recent release Inside Out 2, the studio has continually found visually innovative ways to tell meaningful and imaginative stories that can be understood and enjoyed by all ages. Whether the studio is crafting a sequel, spinoff, or an entirely new premise, this approach has remained consistent, with Pixar maintaining its quality even when the box office returns did not meet expectations. One of Pixar's greatest strengths is how the films stand the test of time. Twenty-nine years later, Toy Story remains a beloved film, and even those without the benefit of becoming part of a franchise, including Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Coco, continue to be celebrated. The live-action Jungle Book and Lion King may have found their respective critical and financial success, but none of Disney's live-action reimaginings have formed a legacy or enduring fanbase akin to most Pixar films.(courtesy Matthew Rudoy)...

“Mean Streets” was Scorsese’s third feature, but he still had to abide by the rules of the New York neighborhoods he was filming in — even paying off the mob in order to shoot. When Nas asked about getting approval to make the movie from the local-made men, De Niro said “some of the neighborhood guys were in the back” of shots. “I did have a couple of guys who wanted to shoot this hallway,” Scorsese said. “So we did it up at the Mulberry Street building that’s still there. We’re shooting it there, but I had to pay — my father had to go talk to the guy who owned the building. We didn’t get much sympathy from them, my father saying, ‘It’s a kid from the neighborhood. Come on — you’re gonna charge him that much?’ He goes, ‘What? He makes money on this. You make a movie, he’ll go away. We’re still here. This is what it’s gonna cost.’ There was no romantic sticking together. You paid The Sentinel Society. Francis Coppola gave us $5,000 for that because you couldn’t shoot in the festival, because we had to contribute to the San Gennaro Society. As soon as we sold the picture I gave him the money back...

Adam Elliot’s oddball Aussie feature Memoir of a Snail has won the Cristal award for best feature film at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival, the world’s leading international animation fest. The dark dramedy, about a lonely, snail-obsessed hoarder — voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook — recounting her life story to one of her beloved gastropods, is Elliot’s first feature since 2009’s Mary and Max, which also won the top honor at Annecy. An impressive group of Australian A-listers, including Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana and Nick Cave provide supporting voice work. IFC Films picked up North American rights to Memoir of a Snail ahead of the festival...

Anime is more than just a niche in the United States now and Hollywood is taking notice — Netflix especially. The streamer has both produced English-language anime movie/TV adaptations in-house ("One Piece," "Cowboy Bebop") and imported shows made in Japan for international distribution (such as the live-action "Fullmetal Alchemist" trilogy). During the week of May 24-30 2024, "Golden Kamuy" was the ninth most watched streaming original movie across all major platforms. (Its "streaming original" status is a technicality of American release, but still.) It was the seventh Netflix film listed on the chart, with Netflix subscribers having reportedly watched a collective 75.9 million minutes' worth of the movie...

Steven Lisberger's 1982 sci-fi film "Tron" was a special effects bonanza that was disqualified for the Best Visual Effects Oscar the year it came out, as the Academy felt that employing computers to animate film visuals was "cheating." "Tron" famously used extensive CGI, making it the first major feature film to use computers as extensively as it did. The film is about a human computer programmer (Jeff Bridges) who is dematerialized by a malevolent, intelligent computer program, and rematerialized inside a computer mainframe. Back in the early 1980s, rendering CGI models in a computer was a much longer and more arduous process and, as one can see from "Tron," produced relatively rudimentary visuals. The CGI images were constructed of clear polygons, and each object had to be rendered from multiple angles for every single frame of film. Then, once a visual was rendered, a camera had to photograph the computer screen (!), clicking each fully rendered image, laying them out one frame at a time. In many ways, this was carried out very much the same way one might make traditional cel animation. Instead of photographing a hand-painted image, however, it was the in-computer rendering...