Woody Allen’s ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and his wife Soon-Yi Previn will not be called to testify at a trial pitting the movie director against American Apparel, a lawyer for the clothing company said on Thursday. Allen sued the US clothing company for false advertising more than a year ago seeking more than US$10 million after the American film director’s image appeared on billboards in New York and Los Angeles. Allen says his image was damaged and used for profit without his consent.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author, said he may face new compensation claims for remarks he made about the World War I-era killing of Armenians, despite an earlier acquittal in a criminal trial, the Anatolian news agency said on Saturday. Turkey’s Court of Appeals this week overturned a lower court decision that had dismissed the claims of personal damages against Pamuk, 56, paving the way for a new case.
Actor Charles “Bud” Tingwell, who starred in more than 100 films and television programs in his native Australia and in Britain, has died aged 86, his family said on Friday. Tingwell, whose career spans some 60 years, died in a Melbourne hospital with his daughter Virginia and son Christopher at his bedside. A statement on his Web site said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and took ill two weeks ago.
A dying Farrah Fawcett is caught in the middle of a legal battle between her longtime companion, Ryan O’Neal, and a producer who has worked with the Charlie’s Angels star during her fight with cancer. The dispute centers on the TV documentary Farrah’s Story, which aired on NBC on Friday. Fawcett collaborated with producer Craig Nevius on the video diary that makes clear she is nearing the end of her life.
Emotional Korean tale Mother of a woman’s relentless fight to save her mentally challenged boy won a standing ovation for cult The Host director Bong Joon-ho at the Cannes festival on Saturday.
Starring veteran actress Kim Hye-ja as a mother convinced of her son’s innocence in a murder case, the movie brought the audience to its feet after premiering as one of the films running for the Un Certain Regard prize for fresh upcoming talent.
“A mother can be a noble figure or a savage beast,” the director said.
In the audience were fellow South Koreans at Cannes, director Park Chan-wook, whose movie Thirst is competing for the coveted Palme d’Or and writer-director and former minister Lee Chang-dong, who is a member of this year’s Palme jury.
Crowds hoping to glimpse the stars on the Cannes festival’s red carpet got an eye-popping surprise on Saturday as a team of nude Belgian cyclists paraded down the Riviera seafront.
Director Felix van Groeningen and four of his actors straddled bicycles and careened down the Croisette and back under warm spring sunshine, in a remake of a scene from La Merditude des Choses (The Misfortunates).
The comedy, which tells the story of a family of drunkard brothers, seen through a teenagers’ eyes, premiered on Saturday at the Directors’ Fortnight, one of two high-profile sidebars to the main Cannes film festival.
For China’s Lou Ye (婁燁), the journey to the red carpet on the Riviera is fraught with risk.
Lou is at the festival with a movie made undercover after he was barred from working by Chinese authorities.
Lou tackles subjects that make officials at home uneasy — gay relationships in Spring Fever (春風沉醉的晚上).
Lou, 44, was banned from filmmaking in China for five years after he brought his last film Summer Palace (頤和園) — about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — to Cannes in 2006 without permission. He shot Spring Fever, a moody and sexually explicit drama that tracks the romantic entanglements of five characters over the course of a torrid spring season, with a small camera and without authorization in the city of Nanjing.
“I was worried I might be stopped from working — worried I might get a call from the Chinese Film Bureau,’’ he said on Friday.
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
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