World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
A packed Friday at the cinema, Netflix’s content chief exits, The Mummy gets a title, Busan crowns Midday Meal, Ralph Fiennes goes racing & Prince Charles is saved!
Morning, all. Yesterday I told you about Netflix’s 1,000 job cuts; today there’s another shock from the streamer, and a busy Friday of new releases to get through.
New in UK and Irish cinemas: The big three arriving today. Kitao Sakurai’s Street Fighter stars Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo as Ryu and Ken, with Jason Momoa, Cody Rhodes and 50 Cent, and reviews so far suggest a strong start that falls apart in the second half. Whalefall, directed by Brian Duffield, stars Austin Abrams as a diver swallowed by a sperm whale – yes, you read that right! – with Josh Brolin as his father. It is as much a father-and-son drama as a survival thriller. DreamWorks’ Forgotten Island follows two best friends (voiced by H.E.R. and Liza Soberano) stranded on a mythical island drawn from Filipino folklore, and has been out in the US since 25 September. The rest of the day’s openers are:
- Case 137: Dominik Moll’s thriller stars Léa Drucker as an internal affairs investigator probing a police shooting during the 2018 Gilets Jaunes protests.
- Winter of the Crow: Lesley Manville plays a British professor who witnesses a student’s murder by secret police in 1981 Warsaw, in Kasia Adamik’s thriller based on a story by Olga Tokarczuk.
- Dracula: Hammer’s 1958 classic returns in a new 4K restoration in more than 100 UK cinemas, with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and footage believed missing for more than 60 years.
- Deadline: In select cinemas only, Hong Kong director Kiwi Chow’s bleak school drama, which has been banned in Hong Kong.
- Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam: Rajkummar Rao plays the prosecutor in the Ajmal Kasab trial after the 26/11 attacks (not to be confused with Nana Patekar’s 1991 film of the same name).
- By Design: Amanda Kramer’s deadpan comedy in which Juliette Lewis swaps bodies with a chair.
- Also opening: the horror The Influencer Project, It’s My Time and a re-release of Alejandro Amenábar’s ghost story The Others.
New in US cinemas only: Focus Features opens Sense and Sensibility, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, in US cinemas today, three weeks after its UK release on 25 September. There’s also the horror Crawlers, in which residents of a quarantined apartment building fight off an infestation of poisonous spiders, and the comedy Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, starring Kal Penn as Dr Sandeep Kapoor, who is implicated in the death of his former patient Anna Nicole Smith, with Linda Hamilton and Abbie Cornish.
Netflix’s content chief exits: Netflix has announced that chief content officer Bela Bajaria is leaving after nearly 10 years, to be replaced by former Disney executive Peter Rice, who will oversee the global content group, including film, scripted and unscripted series and live events. Rice built his career at Fox Searchlight and produced the Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire with Danny Boyle. It comes a day after the layoffs, with Netflix’s shares down around 20% so far this year and earnings due on Tuesday. A new content chief a day after 1,000 redundancies: I’d say it’s been quite a week in Los Gatos.
The Mummy gets a title: Universal has officially titled the fourth Mummy film The Mummy: The Book of the Dead, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning as Rick and Evie O’Connell, directed by Radio Silence (the collective name for Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett). It is due for release in cinemas on 15 October 2027.
Busan crowns Midday Meal: Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal has won the Best Film award at the Busan International Film Festival, which makes it eligible for Oscar consideration.
Ralph Fiennes goes racing: Ralph Fiennes will star as the trainer Henry Cecil in Nora Fingscheidt’s racehorse drama Unbeaten, which follows Cecil’s partnership with the champion racehorse Frankel. It reunites him with Conclave producer Tessa Ross and Studiocanal.
Hoorah for Prince Charles!: On a definitely upbeat local note, I was delighted to be informed that London’s historic Prince Charles Cinema – which has been at risk of being shut down and turned into something monstrous for the last 21 months – has secured its future with a 25-year lease. It has also been designated by Westminster Council as an Asset of Community Value which will hopefully give it protection for a much longer time.
Birthdays: Tim Robbins turns 68 today, star of The Shawshank Redemption, and Kenneth Lonergan, the director of Manchester by the Sea, turns 64. Also celebrating are David Zucker (79), co-director of Airplane!, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (64), who played Douglas J. Needles in Back to the Future Part II..
That’s all for today.
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