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Jawan, a Hindi action thriller with Bollywood royalty Shah Rukh Khan set opening day records in India that are echoing Stateside. The Yash Raj Films release grossed more than $1.36 million on Thursday at 764 locations, meaning it was the no. 2 movie across North America behind wide release The Eoqualizer 3 with Denzel Washington. It edges up to 827 screens today.

The film directed by Atlee Kumar — about a man driven by a personal vendetta to rectify the wrongs of society and keep a promise made years ago — had some Imax screens too, including NYC’s AMC Empire in Times Square.

Shah Rukh Khan has now broken his own record in India. He also starred in Pathaan, released in January, which topped the local box office for a Hindi-language film.

Indian fare, long a staple of the U.S. theaters, has been even more crucial since Covid given the reliability of audiences that stream...

Comandante.Beyond the Venice Film Festival's habitual paucity of female filmmakers, the most striking aspect of this year’s lineup was its astounding number of biopics. Granted, the genre has always been a staple of the fest, which under artistic director Alberto Barbera has effectively metastasized into a launchpad for Hollywood’s awards race. But the inclusion of so many in its eightieth edition was nonetheless remarkable. The official competition alone was home to six—among them big studio projects like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Michael Mann’s Ferrari—to say nothing of all those slotted in the parallel sidebars, from Quentin Dupieux’s fittingly surrealist Daaaaaali! to Neo Sora’s Ryuichi Sakamoto—Opus. Beyond the industry’s flirtations with the genre for its bona fide commercial potential, what accounts for our ongoing fascination with biopics is perhaps their promises of identification and revelation: in charting the lives of extraordinary figures,...

Pablo Larraín’s primary mode is deconstruction, of everything from genre to myth to ideology. But given its intensely subjective point of view, El Conde shares more in common with Spencer and Jackie than the filmmaker’s earlier investigations into Chile’s tumultuous past, Post Mortem and No. The film seeks to dispense with the historical record and imagine what happens behind closed doors. Of course, there’s one important difference here: El Conde is certainly no stickler for verisimilitude, as the Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) of this film is a morose vampire fasting from blood in order to ease himself into death.

That premise might suggest that Larraín has sympathy for the devil, but El Conde is no hagiography. The film renders Pinochet as an aging, ever-prattling child of sorts, who no longer wants to live in a Chile that has no appreciation for all his “great work,” nor...

Putting the blackened, flash-frozen heart of Chile’s undead past into a blender, blitzing it to a lumpen pulp and guzzling down the result with grimly comic relish, Pablo Larraín, after his Hollywood forays with “Spencer” and “Jackie,” returns to his home turf and finds it bleeding out from a mysterious two-hole puncture on its neck. “El Conde” — the Chilean director’s uncategorizably bizarre riff on vampire mythos, cronyist corruption and the more mundane horror that is a squabbling family divvying up their patriarchal inheritance while the patriarch is still around — coils itself around an inventively nasty literalization of the idea that the evil that men does lives after them. Those words, spoken over Caesar’s body in “Julius Caesar,” sparked a war that ended a republic. With his iteration, Larraín aims to do his part in delivering a republic instead, bringing his elegantly foul exercise in gallows humor to bear,...

The Chilean filmmaker’s dark satire premieres in Venice competition.

It has been more than a decade since No, Pablo Larraín’s last feature about former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the filmmaker returns to the territory with his dark satire El Conde, which receives its world premiere in Venice today (August 31).

The territory was familiar and uncharted. Whereas 2012’s No and the two earlier films in Larraín’s Pinochet trilogy – Tony Manero (2008) and Post Mortem (2010) – steered clear of depicting the tyrant on screen and focused on how his violent rule (1973-1990) bled into the psyche of Chileans, El Conde is something very different.

Netflix has debuted the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s horror satire ‘El Conde.’

The movie is a dark comedy/horror that imagines a parallel universe inspired by the recent history of Chile. The film portrays Augusto Pinochet, a symbol of world fascism, as a vampire who lives hidden in a ruined mansion in the cold southern tip of the continent. Feeding his appetite for evil to sustain his existence.

After two hundred and fifty years of life, Pinochet has decided to stop drinking blood and abandon the privilege of eternal life. He can no longer bear that the world remembers him as a thief. Despite the disappointing and opportunistic nature of his family, he finds new inspiration to continue living a life of vital and counterrevolutionary passion through an unexpected relationship.

Directed by Larrain, Chilean actors Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro and Paula Luchsinger star. They are joined by Catalina Guerra,...

As you may recall, a mysterious Netflix movie titled The Count had been rated “R” earlier this year for “strong violence and gore” and “graphic nudity,” and we now know the project is from director Pablo Larraín (Spencer), officially titled El Conde and coming soon to Netflix.

El Conde will premiere on Netflix on September 15, 2023. Watch the trailer below for a taste of the black & white vampire movie, which looks like a highly unique new take on the genre.

“El Conde is a dark comedy/horror that imagines a parallel universe inspired by the recent history of Chile. The film portrays Augusto Pinochet, a symbol of world fascism, as a vampire who lives hidden in a ruined mansion in the cold southern tip of the continent.

“Feeding his appetite for evil to sustain his existence. After two hundred and fifty years of life, Pinochet has decided to stop drinking blood...

As he bounces back and forth between English-language projects and Chilean features, Pablo Larraín is following Spencer with El Conde, which imagines Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as an aged vampire who, after 250 years in this world, has decided to die once and for all, due to ailments brought about by his dishonor and family conflicts. Ahead of a Venice Film Festival premiere, followed by a September 15 release on Netflix and theatrical release the same month, the first trailer has now arrived. Meanwhile, Larraín is also prepping to kick off production on his Maria Callas biopic starring Angelina Jolie.

“I understand that there may be things linked to my family and life that could affect the way I see all this,” Larraín told IndieWire. “In Chile, many, many families have seen both sides of the story and different perceptions of it. Maybe mine is more known because there are known politicians in it,...