If “The Paper Tigers” sags around the middle and loses its focus as it limps towards a finale that doesn’t hit with the force that it should, well, perhaps that’s to be expected from a martial arts movie whose heroes can’t throw a punch without pulling a muscle. Tran establishes his old-school Kung Fu bonafides right from the jump, as the action kicks off with a shadowy prologue in which the great Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan, whose natural gravitas lends this film some much-needed heft) is killed by an assassin’s deadly palm technique in the alley behind the Chinese restaurant where he works these days....

“The Suicide Squad” has the potential for a $40 million opening, and the strong likelihood of more. It opened last weekend in the U.K./Ireland opposite “Jungle Cruise” and beat the Disney title by 50 percent. In that territory, “Suicide” is theater only, while “Jungle” had Disney+ availability — with less PVOD penetration. Related ‘The Suicide Squad’: James Gunn Had Just Two Conditions for Making His R-Rated Superhero Film ‘The Suicide Squad’: How Cancellation of ‘Akira’ Allowed James Gunn to Cast Taika Waititi Related Nightmare Film Shoots: The Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from ‘Deliverance’ to ‘Mad Max’ to ‘Avatar 2’ Oscars 2023: Best International Feature Film PredictionsObstacles for “The Suicide Squad” include its R-rating (per MPA, for “strong violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual references, drug use, and brief graphic nudity”)....

Here’s the official synopsis, per Netflix: “Were George Mallory and his companion Andrew Irvine the first men to scale Everest on June 8, 1924? Only the little Vestpocket Kodak camera they took with them might reveal the truth. In Kathmandu, 70 years later, a young Japanese reporter named Fukamachi Makoto recognizes the camera in the hands of the mysterious Habu Joji, an outcast climber believed missing for years. Fukamachi enters a world of obsessive mountaineers hungry for impossible conquests on a journey that leads him, step by step, towards the summit of the gods....

The new Season 2 trailer centers on Geralt beginning to train Ciri; their relationship is expected to be a central theme throughout the show’s upcoming batch of episodes. Netflix’s Season 2 synopsis reads: “Convinced Yennefer’s life was lost at the Battle of Sodden, Geralt of Rivia brings Princess Cirilla to the safest place he knows, his childhood home of Kaer Morhen. While the Continent’s kings, elves, humans and demons strive for supremacy outside its walls, he must protect the girl from something far more dangerous: the mysterious power she possesses inside....

After back-to-back emceeing gigs in 2017 and 2018, including during the infamous Best Picture mixup that resulted in the “La La Land” team temporarily handed statuettes that rightfully belonged to “Moonlight,” the Academy decided to go three straight Oscars ceremonies without a host at all. The hope was for a leaner, faster-paced ceremony. That never happened. Meanwhile, ratings for the ceremony kept going down with each year until hitting rock bottom for the odd COVID-impacted ceremony in 2021 that took place at Los Angeles’ Union Station and tried to create a Rick’s Cafe Americain vibe from “Casablanca....

“This is the filmmaker who, this year, has risen into the 2020 vision of the entire cine-­passionate planet like a new sun,” Swinton writes. “Whip-smart, highly skilled, supremely cine-­literate, exuberant, irreverent, self-determining, deeply romantic, with a voracious delight in the absurd, highly principled, precision-tuned, compassionate to the last: his films have always been all this. It just seems to be time for the world to catch up.” Bong’s journey with “Parasite” started at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where the movie became the first South Korean title to take home the Palme d’Or....

At the Sundance Film Festival, Beckwith told IndieWire, “A lot of surrogacy movies there’s this dour, sad, ominous thing of, like, ‘I can’t believe I have to give up this baby.’ I think that’s also really connected to the way we view women as ‘women are meant to be mothers’ and deeply identify with that all the time. We don’t talk about a male biological clock ever. It exists. Men want to be dads....