News

On March 27, 2025, Abs-cbn‘s Film Archives and Restoration and Ayala Malls launched A Rewind, their retrospective feature partnership which aims to make “timeless films accessible to the wider audience” according to their press release. This is a great opportunity to launch retrospective screens in commercial movie theaters because the practice is quite rare in the Philippines. They chose to begin with a film titled “Kailan Ka Magiging Akin.”

Released in 1991 by Vision Films, a company that was subsequently absorbed by the film giant, Star Cinema, “Kailan Ka Magiging Akin” adapts for the screen a popular serial radio drama. The title refers to a drama between characters whose motivations center on one child. Dolor (Janice de Belen) is hired by Jaime (Eddie Gutierrez) to temporarily take care of the child adopted by his cousin, Adul (Vivian Velez). On the side of this set up are two women with extreme attitudes toward...

Leading executives from HBO, A24, NBCUniversal and Amazon Studios are among the judges forScreen International’s third annual Global Production Awards.

Jay Roewe, senior vice president at HBO, joins the jury alongside ValerieGuerette-Langlais, head of production tax and incentives at A24, and Veronica Sullivan, senior vice president and head of global production external affairs and state and local government at NBCUniversal.

Other judges include Melissa Heuer, principal for economic development policy at Amazon Studios, Annee Helvig Frost, Sf Studios’ sustainability manager, and Susan Kirby, CEO at Screen Producers Ireland. The full list of judges is below and here.

The entry...

Tragedy is the inspiration for Jose Javier Reyes' Mga Mumunting Lihim (Those Little Secrets). A death of a dear friend, whose wake and eulogy revealed to Reyes certain circumstances in their friendship he may have overlooked, would urge Reyes to craft a story out of newly discovered questions and insecurities pertaining to long-term platonic relationships. The most interesting thing about Reyes' story is that it is more reliant on witty humor than weepy dramatics, suggesting that Reyes is more fascinated in the comedic urges of social humans than he is with teary narrative contrivances. That suggestion, as it turns out, never ripens into reality. The plot is driven primarily by the estrogen-powered histrionics of a bunch of middle-class friends who've gone through a lot...

The young lovers in Jose Javier Reyes' Till My Heartaches End have the easiest of romances. Unfettered by meddling family members, poverty, or other problems that stall the relationships of their counterparts in other movies, Powie (Gerald Anderson), a young man who ambitions to make his own name and wealth, and Agnes (Kim Chiu), a nursing graduate from the province who relocates to Manila to review for the board exams, get into a relationship without any issue.

 

After an encounter in a coffee shop where Powie was working and a fateful meeting in the heart of Manila that led to a lunch of cheap soft-boiled eggs covered in orange batter in the middle of a busy street, the two become inseparable. When Powie starts to earn more money as a real estate agent, the relationship starts to crack and reveal its weaknesses, starting with the impression that maybe Powie,...

Jose Javier Reyes' Working Girls is a disappointment. Just like the counterfeit bags one of Reyes' characters peddles to her internet clients, the film hardly matches the 1984 Ishmael Bernal satire with the same title that it supposedly updates. Even if independently assessed of Bernal's acclaimed urban comedy, Working Girls is still an unforgivably incoherent, annoyingly shallow, and ultimately pointless exercise. In an interview, Reyes admits that this film was made as a sort of tribute to Bernal and Amado Lacuesta, screenwriter of the 1984 comedy. Given Reyes' intentions for writing and directing this update of Bernal's classic, I can only conclude that this films' biggest achievement is that it will inevitably raise awareness of the existence of Bernal's film, and hopefully gain for it more followers.

 

Perhaps my displeasure for Reyes' film is a tad exaggerated. Reyes, I admit, is a very smart and able writer whose gift for gab...