‘Simpsons’ Episode That References Chinese Labor Camps Unavailable On Disney+ In Hong Kong

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Hong Kong courtroom drama film “A Guilty Conscience” edged aside Chinese and Hollywood tentpole films to top the mainland China box office in its opening weekend. According to data from consultancy service Artisan Gateway, the film earned $8.5 million (RMB58.4 million) in its opening three days between Friday and Sunday. “The Wandering Earth 2,” which has been in cinemas for over a month, earned $7.4 million to elevate its cumulative total to $568 million. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which opened on top a week earlier, collected $7.0 million, giving it a 10-day cumulative of $31.4 million.

went missing on Tuesday. Her dismembered legs were found three days later in a fridge in a makeshift butcher's workshop but her head, torso and hands were missing. On Sunday, police found Ms Choi’s missing head and some ribs in a big soup pot, the South China Morning Post reported.

Manchester City Centre came to a standstill today as there was a huge turnout in solidarity with Ukraine one year and one day after the country was invaded by Russian forces. The positivity and togetherness on show through music and chants were emotionally charged as people still feel the pain of parts of their country being under occupation.

Jessica Kiang The quote that opens Chinese director Liu Jian’s shaggy but amiable new animated feature is instructive. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” is a passage from James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and indeed, Liu was himself at art college as a young man in the early ’90s, when and where “Art College 1994” is, unsurprisingly, set. The quasi-memoir feel to the movie does have its charm — it’s always a kick to see animation techniques applied not to extravagant flights of fancy but to slices of real, ordinary life — but it’s also its chief flaw. In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, “Art College 1994” gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.

The competition winners of the 73rd Berlinale are about to start rolling in as the festival draws to a close Saturday evening.

What Priscilla So and Brian Hung don’t know about beer probably isn’t worth knowing. So Priscilla has exactly the beer in mind to go with the Hong Kong-style french toast they serve at Harcourt, their new pub in Altrincham.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief China-based video streamer iQiyi achieved a surge in paying subscriptions and achieved net profits in the fourth quarter of 2022. While still loss-making over the full year, the company hailed its turnaround as “miraculous.” In the October-December period, gross revenues were RMB7.6 billion ($1.1 billion), representing a 3% increase year over year, the company said in a regulatory filing. Net income attributable to iQiyi was RMB304 million ($44.1 million), compared to a net loss of RMB1.8 billion in the same period in 2021. Over the course of the full 2022, total revenues were RMB29.0 billion ($4.2 billion), representing a 5% decrease from 2021. Net losses decreased from RMB6.2 billion to RMB136 million ($19.7 million).

Naman Ramachandran Damon Wayans Jr. and Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor will create and write the graphic novel “Shogun Run.” Set in 1990s South Central Los Angeles, “Shogun Run” is described as “Big Trouble in Little China” meets “Attack the Block.” Producers David Uslan and Gary Glushon will serve as creative consultants on the project, while the illustrator will be revealed imminently. The graphic novel will be published by First Second, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, in 2025. A series or film adaptation of the graphic novel is on the cards down the line. Wayans Jr. was most recently in Netflix’s “The Harder They Fall,” which opened the 2021 BFI London Film Festival and went on to win a BAFTA. Bachelor, an internet personality with more than 27 million followers on TikTok as King Bach, is currently in thriller film “Fear.”

Lise Pedersen The Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, has unveiled the full program of its 20th edition, which includes 200 new films, more than half of which are world premieres, sealing CPH:DOX’s reputation as one of the leading events of its kind in Europe. For the first time, all 13 films competing for the top Dox:Award are world premieres. These include “A Storm Foretold,” the long-awaited doc on Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone by Danish political journalist Christopher Guldbrandsen; established filmmaker Margreth Olin’s highly anticipated epic film “Songs of the Earth”; “A Tiger in Paradise,” a surreal journey into Swedish singer José González’ inner world by Ruben Östlund’s regular creative partners Mikel Cee Karlsson and Erik Hemmendorff; and “Total Trust” by Jialing Zhang (“One Child Nation”), described as “the first major film about the Chinese surveillance state (…) – a disturbing tale of technology, (self-) censorship and abuse of power in the 21st century.”

Avril Lavigne revealed if there was any truth in a rumor that she had been cast in a Chinese reality show.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Berlin Film Festival is once again finding house room for Hong Kong’s most commercially successful enfant terrible, Soi Cheang, aka Cheang Pou Soi, who previously brought film noir “Limbo” to the Berlinale. This time he attends with “Mad Fate,” a film about destiny that may be Cheang’s most bloodthirsty, but which the director says is intended to be inspirational. It plays in the Berlinale Special section. Born in Macau, Cheang developed his career at the feet of Ringo Lam, Andrew Lau, Joe Ma, Wilson Yip and Johnnie To, the great stylists of the crime and action film genre across the Pearl River estuary in Hong Kong. To, who is on the Berlin jury this year, is also a producer on “Mad Fate” through his Makerville label.

Jessica Kiang The unusual design of the White Pagoda, a 13th-century Buddhist temple in the Xicheng district of Beijing, makes it hard to see its shadow. This has given rise to the local legend that its shade can actually be found some two thousand miles away in Tibet, the temple’s spiritual home. The landmark is a constant presence in Chinese director Zhang Lu’s tender, brimming “The Shadowless Tower,” which fixes its setting in the very heart of the Chinese capital, a city rarely portrayed as fondly as it is here. But the pagoda can also be seen as an evocatively imperfect metaphor for a lifestage: that tipping point in the middle of one’s time when, with the past and future weighing equally on either side, you can feel disoriented and suddenly directionless, as when the sun is directly overhead and you cast no shadow. 

Hong Kong regulators have ordered local free-to-air TV and radio broadcasters to carry 30 minutes of national education and identity and National Security Law programming each week. 

“I don’t want to owe people money,” are the words defeatedly uttered by Lynn (Yao Honggui), the protagonist of “Stonewalling,” the forthcoming film from the Beijing-based husband-and-wife team, Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka. The film, focusing on Lynn’s life for a year, finds her at a crossroads: in the midst of her college education and has been training for a career as a flight attendant, everything is overtaken by doubt and disarray when Lynn discovers that she’s pregnant.

Naman Ramachandran Indian festival favorite and box office success “Dostojee” (“Two Friends”), directed by Prasun Chatterjee will release across the U.S., U.A.E. and Australia and New Zealand on March 17. California-based film distribution company Bioskope Films LLC has acquired U.S. theatrical rights and will release the film across 75 cities in 26 states. The theatrical release is an Oscar-qualifying run making the Bengali-language “Dostojee” eligible for consideration at the 96th Academy Awards, 2024. The film will have a premiere in New York City. “Dostojee” will also release theatrically across 15 cities in Canada, 10 cities in Australia and New Zealand, and Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Ajman in the U.A.E. Phars Film Co Motion Pictures will handle the U.A.E. distribution and Bongoz Films Australia and New Zealand.

Brooklyn’s Barclays Center two nights in a row.JJ Lin is one of those artists.On Feb. 17 and Feb.

Yibing Wu poses with the Lamar Hunt Trophy after winning the Dallas Open tennis tournament on Sunday (February 12) 2023 at the Styslinger/Altec Tennis Complex in Dallas, Texas.

EXCLUSIVE: Happening writer-director Audrey Diwan has recalibrated her English-language debut Emmanuelle, which is a working title. She has set Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) to star in a film that will begin production September in Hong Kong.

Super Bowl 2023 commercial featuring spheres in the sky.“An unidentified object has been spotted over the skies,” the ad proclaimed. While the commercial is advertising “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere” — a series of concerts that marks the band’s first live shows in four years — many on social media were quick to point out the similarities to the Chinese spy balloon that has been making headlines.“Did you guys make this commercial before last week?” one person asked.“Read the room.

Tell us about the genesis of the projectDoua Moua: After “Gran Torino,” I was on hold for a couple of different projects. They all kinda fell through because [the role] went to a white guy or the project got shelved. So it got to the point, “When am I going to get another role if I don’t write a film for myself? I went back and forth — should I tell the story about my dad and me, a son with his Hmong father going through a kidney issue and [familial] obligation stuff? And so I kind of wrote that.