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NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Martin Scorsese has programmed Living, Breathing New York, which starts with Shadows and a 35mm print of Heaven Knows What on Sunday; The Rubber Gun (watch our exclusive trailer debut) plays Saturday with a Stephen Lack Q&a; Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Wild at Heart screen.

Anthology Film Archives

Robina Rose’s Nightshift (watch our exclusive trailer debut) begins playing in a new restoration; Matías Piñeiro-curated series offers Antonioni, Hollis Frampton, and Straub-Huillet.

Film Forum

Luis Buñuel’s Él begins screening in a 4K restoration; Lou Ye’s Suzhou River and Spring Fever screen; Play It As It Lays and Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman continue; Space Jam screens on Sunday.

IFC Center

Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; eXistenZ, Mulholland Dr., Paprika, Best in Show, Palindromes, and Pink Flamingos show late.

Starz has announced the movie and TV titles that will be available on the service in March. The Starz March 2025 schedule includes the premiere of Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 4 and a selection of films celebrating Women’s History Month.

The Starz app expands in March with an exciting mix of films, including Fast X, Reagan, The Killer’s Game, Never Let Go, Bagman, White Bird, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and more.

Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 4 Starz Highlight

Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 4

In Season Three, Kanan Stark finally stopped living in the shadow of his mother and assumed control of his life, taking matters into his own hands by orchestrating the deaths of Ronnie and Detective Howard. In season four, slates have seemingly have been wiped clean for Kanan, Raq and the rest of the Thomas family. Kanan’s drug business has hit its stride.

Director Lou Ye has sparked the ire of the Chinese government for capturing niche stories onscreen; perhaps the biggest backlash came from his docu-fiction feature “An Unfinished Film.”

The aptly-titled film follows a director as he tries to resume shooting of a film he had abandoned 10 years earlier. The only catch? The filmmaker Xiaorui is trying to go into production in Wuhan, China during the January 2020 lockdown. It wasn’t a great place to be.

Qin Hao, Qi Xi, Huang Xuan, Liang Ming, and Zhang Songwen also star.

“Suzhou River” and “Summer Palace” director Lou helms the feature that blends fact with a fictional narrative. The real footage uses images that were banned or blocked by the government, creating a hybrid docudrama that captured the early days of the Chinese lockdown. Lou and Ma Yingli cowrote the script.

The official synopsis reads: “Set in January 2020, the film follows director Xiaorui...

2011's The Cabin in the Woods is headed to a new streaming home in 2025.

Per Tubi, director Drew Goddard's The Cabin in the Woods is officially joining the free streaming platform's ever-expanding catalogue of films and television shows on January 1. At the time of writing, The Cabin in the Woods stands as Goddard's highest rated film per review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with the film garnering a 92% "Fresh" rating averaged across 291 critical reviews.

Related The Next Evil Dead Sequel Gets Official Title and Release Window

Writer-director Sébastian Vaniček officially unveils the working title and release window for the next feature film entry in the Evil Dead franchise.

Co-written by Goddard and Joss Whedon, 2011's The Cabin in the Woods focused on a group of college students who decide to spend a weekend getaway within the walls of the film's eponymous locale. Unfortunately for them, the isolated, woodland getaway is...

Singer/songwriter Halsey had a role in director Ti West’s horror film MaXXXine (which wrapped up the trilogy that West started with the slasher X and continued with the prequel Pearl), and now Variety reports that West and Halsey are teaming up again for Bloodlust, a dark comedy series that’s set up at the Prime Video streaming service. Halsey will serve as the creator, writer, and executive producer on the show, while West is on board as director and executive producer.

Halsey previous wrote If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, an hour-long fantasy horror “film experience” that was set to the music of the album of the same name.

Details on the plot of Bloodlust have not been revealed. In addition to Halsey and West, the series is being executive produced by Anthony Li, who is Halsey’s manager, and Mark Friedman, who is also the showrunner.

With the release of MaXXXine, Ti West's X trilogy has come to a close, and here is every movie in the series ranked worst to best. Starting with X in 2022, Ti West's horror trilogy took viewers on a decades-spanning journey that explored the horrors and violence that could come about from desires to attain fame, with the story of Maxine Minx and Pearl having a lot of interesting parallels. While each film in Ti West's X trilogy is good, some are better than others, and here is a complete ranking of each one from worst to best.

Ti West's X horror trilogy is much more than a simple series of slasher films, as it is an interesting exploration of how film in its different forms has impacted the world throughout its history. Each film in Ti West's X trilogy pays homage to a different era of film, and while X,...

1. Film Review: Abiding Nowhere (2024) by Tsai Ming-liang

If art is putting an emotion into something you create to transfer that feeling on to its audience, then Tsai certainly achieves something with “Abiding Nowhere” (and the Walker series in general). Beyond slow cinema, this is positively static, as the camera, and indeed the cast, barely move. The slowness, the silence – apart from the background noise – the time allowed to fully contemplate, create a relaxing series of shots to absorb yourself into, feeling your heart rate slow and eyes sigh in a natural progression to sleep.

2. Film Review: Victory (2024) by Park Beom-su

The production also makes the most of its leading ladies’ dancing abilities, choreographing largely pleasing cheerleading sequences, even if more acrobatic sequences, whose absence is fairly explained within the script, could have been welcome. Park Jeong-hoon’s cinematography shies away from being flashy, instead satisfied in capturing the pastel colours...

You can always count on Chinese director Lou Ye to propose a film with a complex meta narrative which blurs the boundary between fiction and reality, dreams, fantasies and facts (the way his celebrated “Suzhou River” did). “An Unfinished Film”, his latest, follows the same path, also tackling the kind of topical issues that have landed Ye in hot water with censorship in the past.

An Unfinished Film is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival

The story starts simply enough: a film director wants to complete a gay romance movie he begun 10 years before but left unfinished. He manages to convince the cast and crew to reunite, and the shooting starts. Unfortunately, the time is January 2020, and the place is Wuhan, China. Soon, as the Covid 19 outbreak starts in earnest, the shooting is suspended and the hotel where the crew is staying is put under immediate lockdown.

The rest...

Nostalgic docufiction that morphs into a lockdown thriller, Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film” is the second work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (alongside Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”) in which a “Sixth Generation” Chinese filmmaker has repurposed their old films to create something new. The line between reality and drama blurs as Lou genuinely re-discovers years-old footage, and proceeds to follow a fictitious film crew completing an abandoned project, only for China’s severe Covid-19 lockdowns to interrupt their work, as well as life in all its rhythms.

Few films have so skillfully captured the way Covid caused such traumatic temporal disruptions in its early days, wherein sudden changes in physical and emotional routine caused time to both stretch and collapse. The foundation for this dissonance is laid when Lou, by way of director character Xiaorui — played by Mao Xiaorui, Lou’s assistant director on...

Lou Ye's docufiction hybrid “Unfinished Film” is one of the best films made about life during pandemic, even though it wasn't originally planned to be that. It was the new circumstances that forced Ye to change his plans, when he and his crew were caught in the lockdown in a place near Wuhan to make a completely different kind of movie. What came out of it is a captivating act of genius which captures the exact moment when normality got squashed by the unpredictable chain of events: first the pandemic, and then a complete lockdown. Shot by multiple cameras, “Unfinished Film” is a movie within a movie, showing people in front and behind the camera, each absorbed in their own line of duty. But the actors and crew members are also caught off-guard, and at one point even Ye himself uexpectedly appears on screen, doing his directing job. In the movie,...

Chinese auteur Lou Ye is on a mission to finish An Unfinished Film, which he is presenting as a Cannes Special Screenings, in a way that he set out to make before the Covid pandemic changed its course. It will exist as a separate film.

He describes the new untitled project as “organic, made in a casual and personal way on a modest budget”. It exists as a separate project to the Cannes title and will contain old and mostly unseen footage from his previous films including Spring Fever, which won best screenplay in Cannes in 2009; Mystery, which premiered in...

Philippe Bober’s Coproduction Office has boarded worldwide sales of Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film ahead of its premiere at Cannes and has already closed two major deals.

The film, which is set to play in the Special Screenings section of the festival next month, has been snapped up by Bac Films for France and Lucky Red for Italy. A first look at the film can be seen above.

Set in January 2020, the story follows a film crew that reunites near Wuhan to resume shooting a film halted 10 years earlier, only to share unexpected challenges as cities are placed under lockdown.

Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki continues his investigation of convicted murderer Robert Durst in The Jinx – Part Two, a six-episode documentary series premiering on Max on April 21, 2024. The streaming service’s April lineup also includes the seven-episode limited series The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and starring Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr in multiple roles.

Comedian Alex Edelman hosts a brand new comedy special, and Conan O’Brien visits favorite fans from his podcast series in the four-episode unscripted series Conan O’Brien Must Go. The documentary series The Synanon Fix exploring the drug rehabilitation program joins Max’s lineup on April 1st. And the streaming service has set April premiere dates for the documentaries Brandy Hellville & The Cult Of Fast Fashion and An American Bombing: The Road To April 19th.

Series & Films Arriving On Max In April 2024

April 1

American Renegades (2018)

Basquiat (1996)

Black Swan (2010)

Body of Lies (2008)

Bridget Jones’s Diary...

Eli Roth just kicked off a new horror franchise with his slasher movie Thanksgiving (read our review Here), as it was recently announced that Thanksgiving 2 is on track for a 2025 release. But while Roth is currently focused on holiday slashing, two franchises he previously created – the Hostel and Cabin Fever franchises – came up while he was sitting down for an interview with CinePOP. And during this interview, he said he hopes to revisit and revive those franchises someday!

Roth told CinePOP, “Hostel, there’s a lot more to do. I’d love to go back to Hostel at some point. And Cabin Fever as well. They’re a part of me, like my children, and I feel like I’ve been ignoring them for too long. I’d love to go back to them, in some way. I have ideas.“

Roth directed the first two Hostel movies and the first Cabin Fever,...

Eager as ever to attend Tiff, a festival I have missed only once in the last 29 years, because a cat bite sent me to the hospital, I am looking forward to discoveries and have booked my calendar tight with films!

I am lucky to have seen three films already, two in Cannes, both wonderful, memorable funny and absurd films, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, So. Korea’s submission for Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and a likely winner, as well as So. Korea’s first-ever Palm d’Or winner in Cannes this year; and Elia Suleiman’s This Must Be Heaven, sweetly surreal, as funny as a Jacques Tati film, wryly observing our human race and with a funny little cameo with Gael Garcia Bernal introducing Suleiman to his agent. The third, Synonyms, won this year’s Berlinale Golden Bear. A coproduction of France, Israel and Germany, it...

The Mulan International Film Festival (MulanIFF) is Canada’s largest film festival that celebrates Chinese-language films and Chinese filmmakers all around the world. The second year of the festival will be held from August 9 to August 17, 2019, in downtown Toronto. The festival will open with The Little Shrimp, the debut feature of the newly-graduated director Chen Zhilin (Chilam), who will be attending the festival. It will close with the Canadian Premiere of Stanley Kwan’s latest film, First Night Nerves.

Founded in 2018, MulanIFF is 100% run by volunteers. In hoping to present the real, unfiltered, and complete picture of China, a small group of recent graduates from the University of Toronto decided to use films as the seeing glass. Mulan International Film Festival was founded with one grand mission: Seeing China, one film at a time.

Image Courtesy: Mulan Festival

Film- Rail

The festival itself aims at facilitating the appreciation of Chinese...

“P Storm,” the fourth installment of a Hong Kong crime thriller franchise, beat Warner Bros.’ new DC Comics superhero flick “Shazam!” by nearly $10 million over their three-day opening weekend in China, indicating a continued preference of Chinese audiences for local films over U.S. fare.

According to data from consultancy Artisan Gateway, “P Storm” took in $39.8 million over the weekend, which included Friday’s Tomb Sweeping Day, a national holiday in China during which families traditionally head home to pay graveside respects to their ancestors. The somewhat unfortunately named film stars Louis Koo as corruption investigator William Luk, who goes undercover at a prison. “P Storm” took pole position at the box office despite a South China Morning Post review that called it an “utterly silly” storyline “laughably detached from reality.”

Directed by David Lam and produced by Raymond Wong’s Hong Kong-based Pegasus Motion Pictures, the film is the...

Now I understand why Cannes 2009 opened with Pixar's "Up." They knew what was coming. Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety of gruesome, sadistic, perverted acts? You know you're in deep water when the genuinely funniest film in the festival is by a Palestinian in today's Israel, whose material includes a firing squad, a mother with Alzheimers, and a hero with dark circles under his eyes who never utters a single word.

And most of these films were not over quickly. Not that there's something wrong with a film running over the invisible 120-minute finish line, if it needs to, and is a good film. I regret that not all the 21 films in this year's selection were good. And that's not just me. The daily critics' panel for Le Film Francais was as negative as I've seen it,...