So why did Anderson return to Focus for his latest star-crammed comedy ensemble, “Asteroid City” (2023), an original “poetic meditation on the meaning of life” co-written with his usual collaborator Roman Coppola? This time Anderson returns to a fictional American locale, setting the 1955 story at a desert town’s Junior Stargazer convention, which pulls in student competitors and their parents from across the country. (Still, the Europhile is shooting the film in Spain....

You know what happened next: a pandemic. Its impact shut down whole countries and has claimed over a million lives to date. For the movies, the changes were swift and brutal: postponed and canceled projects, delayed release dates, pivots to PVOD and streaming, the closure of movie theaters. Among the five blockbusters directed by women, only “Birds of Prey” landed a wide theatrical release. Despite conversations about the need for inclusion and diversity both in front of and behind the camera, recent studies painted a worrying picture: While strides were being made, female filmmakers were still getting shut out of the biggest of big gigs....

“I did not know what to expect,” said AFI FEST director Michael Lumpkin in a phone interview. “We made a pre-pandemic decision to do October, and then in March when everything shifted we did revisit that decision.” After analyzing the pros and cons, he concluded that it’s easier to piggyback on the same publicity tour that brings talent to the Venice, Toronto, New York and London film festivals. “We decided keep it there,” he said....

For the last month, much of Hollywood has been up in arms about the provocative decision to eliminate eight Oscar categories from the live ABC broadcast, with executive producer Will Packer opting instead to pre-tape the below-the-line categories and edit the acceptance speeches into the show to save time. One of those categories is Best Film Editing, and Hollywood’s top editors are none too happy about the move. American Cinema Editors, the organization devoted to honoring film editing that hosts the prestigious ACE Awards, has released a letter imploring the Academy to change the decision (via The Hollywood Reporter)....

Burdened with the knowledge that this $80 million studio project could be the last of its kind, “Babylon” refracts Hollywood’s first major identity crisis through the prism of its latest one. It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here....

In that process, sometimes episodes get repeated and others fall off. Like the ranking from 50 to 1, it’s arbitrary in nearly every case. In past years, we’ve included the idea that the year-end and mid-year lists are companion pieces, not meant to be mutually exclusive but taken as a whole. Taking a cue from an atypical calendar year, I had the idea to find a spiritual connection for each of the 50 shows from our mid-year check-in back in July....

That’s not a lot, but it’s better than Searchlight’s theater-only flop “The Personal History of David Copperfield.” Based on those two performances, UA made the right move: Searchlight devoted marketing spend to a disappointheatrical release that now must wait until November before it can play VOD. “Bill & Ted” was first on all three possible charts (Spectrum’s full-week list ended August 27, the day before its availability). “Fatima” (Picturehouse), the other new PVOD entry, appeared on two....