WASHINGTON (AFP) ― Eddie Murphy is to star in a television film under development by HBO about Washington’s colorful and controversial former mayor Marion Barry, the U.S. cable channel said Tuesday. In an email to AFP, it confirmed a report in The Washington Post that Spike Lee will direct Murphy ― seen most recently in the comedy caper “Tower Heist” ― in the still-untitled project. Barry was w...

SAN DIEGO (AP) ― Steven Spielberg hopes he’s the typical American when it comes to Tintin. The filmmaker had never heard of the guy, but once he got acquainted, they became friends for life. Peter Jackson knows he’s the typical non-American when it comes to Tintin. He’s known him since before he could read, and the character’s globe-trotting adventures are part of his own storytelling DNA. Toge...

NEW YORK (AFP) ― Steven Spielberg announced in New York a sequel to his 3-D movie version of the comic book hero Tintin. He told a press conference Sunday that “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson would direct the new film and that he had already chosen the book by the Belgian author Herge that would serve as the basis for the script. Spielberg was promoting the U.S. premiere on Dec. 21 o...

LOS ANGELES ― Although Hollywood movies are making more money than ever overseas, it’s still a struggle for foreign films to sell tickets in the United States. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ― Part 2” collected nearly a billion dollars abroad this year, the most of any American studio production. About $120 million of that sum came from one country ― Japan. Other U.S. films that hit big o...

BEIJING (AFP) ― Oscar winning actor Christian Bale defended Sunday the upcoming Nanjing Massacre film “The Flowers of War,” by China’s most famous director, Zhang Yimou, as more than an anti-Japanese propaganda film. In the film, Bale plays an American drifter who becomes the unwitting protector of a group of Chinese schoolgirls and prostitutes trying to escape the Japanese army’s brutal sacking...

HAVANA (AP) ― The hottest ticket in Havana is a gory, campy zombie flick with a wicked sense of humor about Cuba’s obsessive relations with the United States, one that revels in islanders’ knack for making the best of things even when everything around you ― buildings, streets, human limbs ― is falling to pieces. Audiences thronged movie houses this week to catch screenings of “Juan of the Dead,...

DUBAI (AFP) ― Actor Tom Cruise was the undisputed star on the red carpet at the opening of the Dubai Film Festival, sharing the limelight with Bollywood stars and the widow of late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. Cruise attended the screening of his latest release, “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” which was filmed in Dubai and includes a dramatic scene where the U.S. actor climbs the s...