The movie calendar can’t seem to find its old rhythm: Oscar season intersects with SXSW and “The Batman” is soaring in a period that was once a box-office dumping ground. But one element is returning to the scene right on schedule and it’s more than welcome in this column: Cannes hype! While COVID case counts in Europe may be cause for concern, the world’s most glamorous celebration of the art form remains on track for its 75th edition as it returns to its usual May slot....

That’s what it seemed fated to become in 2012 when Lionsgate hired Charlie Kaufman to adapt the first installment of Patrick Ness’ trilogy and its Film Twitter-like premise into a potential franchise-starter. But the house that “Hunger Games” built appears not to have shared the books’ enthusiasm for messing with the YA formula, Kaufman left the project long before Doug Liman finally rolled cameras on it in 2017, and principal photography on the movie became the first step in the four-year process of sandblasting away everything that once made the source material so exciting....

The Oscar-winning writer/director is set to adapt his 1989 classic film “Cinema Paradiso” into a six-episode streaming series, as Variety first reported. Tornatore will write and direct the TV show, produced by Marco Belardi (“Perfect Strangers”) through his Bamboo Production banner. Belardi revealed the series is set to land at a prominent U.S. streamer. “Cinema Paradiso” tells the story of a stunning Sicilian cinema house where a young boy named Toto falls in love with film....

But, more importantly, the crew knew that after three different iterations of the Lecter story, they didn’t want to repeat anything. “It has been explored in great depth by so many brilliant people,” producer Alex Kurtzman said. As they were writing the pilot, he and creator Jenny Lumet kept reiterating the tagline that the “silence is over.” “She hasn’t spoken in 30 years and we think it’s time for her to speak now,” Kurtzman said....

CNN parent company WarnerMedia announced on Thursday that, per Nielsen data, the network averaged 5.221 million viewers in “total day” ratings, which is the 24-hour period that began at 3 a.m. on Wednesday. MSNBC came in second place in total day ratings among the cable news networks with an average of 4.006 million viewers. Fox News came in third place with 2.988 million average viewers. CNN’s primetime coverage of the Wednesday riot also received more viewers than coverage at competing networks: CNN’s evening reports received an average of 8....

Series creator Dan Harmon discussed the possibility of Chase reprising his role from the original NBC series for the upcoming Peacock film. “I don’t even know if it’s legal for him to come back,” Harmon said during a moderated New York Comic Con discussion (via Variety). “That may be out of my hands. There may something I sign for with an insurance company.” “Community” debuted in 2009 and centered on a dysfunctional community college, with Chase, Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Donald Glover, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, and Yvette Nicole Brown as students....

In the original Japanese anime series that ran 1997 through 1998, the arc Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener, as they’re known fully, was explored in the two-part episode “Jupiter Jazz.” An aspiring saxophone player at the club known as the Rooster House and a veteran of the Titan War, Gren was subjected to experimental drugs that increased their estrogen and caused them to grow breasts. Gen’s fluid sexual identity ascended the character to a rare LGBTQ representation in anime....