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May 30 - June 6

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Apple TV+ debuts trailer for whimsical new preschool series “Not a Box,” premiering globally Friday, June 13. Based on the beloved, award-winning children’s picture book of the same name by the New York Times bestselling author Antoinette Portis, the animated series invites young viewers into a world where imagination transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary...

Auteur Francis Ford Coppola has landed his second making-of documentary and, despite its pun-ny title, “Megadoc” is billed as a serious look into the controversial and convoluted production of Coppola’s recent feature “Megalopolis.” “Leaving Las Vegas” director Mike Figgis was there to capture the making-of process on film, turning it into “Megadoc,” which may sound like a “Sharknado” crocodile spinoff but is, in fact, a Coppola-sanctioned feature. Coppola is keeping the distribution of the film all in the family, as his nephew Robert Schwartzman’s company Utopia has acquired the North American rights for the film. According to Coppola, “Megadoc” will showcase the many versions of the truth about what it really was like to film “Megalopolis” in Georgia. “The great filmmaker Mike Figgis shot the making of ‘Megalopolis’ as he saw it,” Coppola said. “Interestingly, there are many interpretations of what really happened and it’s all in the documentary although the documentary doesn’t always say which is what. It is for the viewer to behold and interpret.”...

Darren Aronofsky has launched a new generative AI storytelling venture in which he will partner with Google DeepMind to produce short films with Gen-AI and some of Google’s newly announced tools. The venture is titled Primordial Soup, and its research team, along with three filmmakers, will produce short films integrating new tech and storytelling and has the mission statement of creating frameworks for AI’s role in filmmaking and putting artists in the driver’s seat of technological innovation. “Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later technological breakthroughs — sound, color, VFX — allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling,” Aronofsky said in an official statement...

Guillermo del Toro’s film school will be back in session in Toronto this summer when the Oscar-winning director hosts a lecture series on Canadian horror movies at TIFF Lightbox. The July 9 to 13 curated showcase for TIFF Cinematheque, entitled From Rabid to Skinamarink: Canadian Movie Madness, will see the maestro of monsters take audiences through a series of iconic genre pics like David Cronenberg’s sophomore feature Rabid (1977), Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997) and John Fawcett’s supernatural fright pic Ginger Snaps starring Katharine Isabelle (2000) to reveal and explain their horror genre beats. The Mexican director will also explain the mechanics of Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (2008), and Kyle Edward Ball’s feature directorial debut, Skinamarink (2022) for their own visual and emotional impacts on audiences. Del Toro has made Toronto a second home after Los Angeles. And the Canadian city has hosted production for a number of his movies, including Mimic, the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, Nightmare Alley and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein. His TV series The Strain was also shot locally...

Netflix has acquired Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave, specifically to the 1960 classic Breathless. Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time criminal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student in Paris. If Nouvelle Vague is not exactly Breathless, it’s a loving homage to the crazy way Breathless was made — back when you could shoot movies fast, cheap and out of control, and somehow change cinema in the process.”...