"100 Must-See Hong Kong Movies" is, as James Marsh puts it at Twitch, the Hong Kong Film Archive's "most ambitious program to date," set to unreel over the next four years. Programmer Sam Ho and his team have selected the 100 from its collection of around 90,000 titles, and that 100 includes, of course, such classics as Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China, King Hu's Come Drink with Me (image above), John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild. Marsh: "What is most exciting, however, is the opportunity to plunder areas of Hong Kong's cinematic past that haven't received nearly as much love as its action films. There is a strong contingent of melodramas from the 1950s in the series, featuring such underappreciated classics as Lee Sun Fung's It Was a Cold Winter Night, Wong Tin Lam's The Wild, Wild Rose or even screwball comedies like Li Pingqian's Awful Truth."
Speaking of comedies and top 100s, Time Out London has selected its "100 best comedy movies," from which Edgar Wright has selected a personal top ten.
Toronto may be a non-competitive festival, but that doesn't mean there aren't any awards.
Kate Winslet's won an Emmy for her performance in Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce, but the story with legs (albeit probably very short legs) is Alec Baldwin's decision to boycott the evening when Fox News refused to air a joke about the phone-hacking scandal.
Reed Hastings makes it official. Netflix is a company that puts flicks on the Net. Period. You want DVDs in your mailbox, you go to Qwikster.
Terrence Malick doesn't exactly wave at the camera in the three-minute video Johnny Garcia posted via his Twitvid account yesterday, but he doesn't shy away from it, either. At some point in the planning stage of whatever project it is that he's working on with Christian Bale, he must have decided to simply get over whatever it was that's had him avoiding the public eye all these years. You'll remember the photo that appeared over the weekend; we can probably expect many more. Meantime, Ambrose Heron wonders if these scenes might not be a part of the movie formally known as Burial rather than a second followup to The Tree of Life.
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @thedailyMUBI on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.