Artificial Intelligence is allowing automation to be faster, broader and more disruptive than ever before. We’ve long been confident that creativity is the one aspect of human nature that would be impossible to be performed by machines, but it takes just a quick glance at recent AI advancements to realize that the next Spielbergs and da Vincis might be made of silicon.

While Avengers: Endgame keeps breaking records, 2019 has been hard in terms of generating box office revenue outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Overall, the film industry hit a six-year low to open this year and theater chains across the nation are feeling the strain. An unlikely lifeline has emerged, however, in the form of e-sports.

American filmmaker S. Craig Zahler is back at Venice Film Festival for a second year running, this time with his Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn cop drama Dragged Across Concrete. Screen caught up with Zahler at the festival to talk about working with controversial figure Gibson, getting projects made outside of the studio system, and why he won’t compromise on the runtime of his films.

The major policy overhaul is announced just as 'Dying to Survive,' a film about the plight of poor cancer sufferers, was storming China's cinemas, earning $232 million in just five days. China has vowed to accelerate its efforts to cut the costs of lifesaving cancer drugs, a move many are viewing as a response to a local blockbuster that highlights the social ills caused by overpriced medication in the country.

Saudi Arabia on Monday lifted a decades-long ban on cinemas, part of a series of social reforms by the powerful crown prince that are shaking up the ultra-conservative kingdom. “Commercial cinemas will be allowed to operate in the kingdom as of early 2018, for the first time in more than 35 years,” the culture and information ministry said in a statement, adding that the government will begin licensing cinemas immediately.

The deal would give the combined entity more than 9,500 screens in the United States and Europe and allow it to better compete with the industry giant.

A modest invention that prevented celluloid from tearing helped make modern cinema. By Henry Giardina.

One of the Best Ghost Stories and Its Clever Warning to Us All

First-time director Brady Corbet’s story of a privileged, petulant 10-year-old fated to become a fascist dictator exerts a lethal grip. By Peter Bradshaw. (Aug. 18, 2016)

Lewis Bond

Cautionary Tales Have Rarely Taken Such an Amazing Artistic Form

Composer/conductor, Lalo Schifrin. This score was used in an advanced trailer which some have called the “banned trailer.”

The 2001 gothic horror film was set in Spain, in 1939, and the picture, which del Toro allegedly considers his most personal film ever, is an exceptionally crafty and compelling portrayal of that specific dark period of European and world history.

The world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.

JJ Abrams, director of the new Star Wars movie, is among the high-profile film-makers going back to using traditional means of scene-setting instead of relying on the relative ease of CGI.

A cinematic history of going airborne. By A. O. Scott.

A Unified Theory on Female Madness in Cinema and American Culture.By Angelica Jade.

At one time the animation mogul’s films veered toward radical, experimental art. These works still appealed to children even if they also went over their heads.

Fredric Jameson reviews “Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative” by David Wittenberg.