News

Angelina Jolie may be a global celebrity, but she’s also a Cambodian citizen, and that balance was essential when she directed “First They Killed My Father,” Netflix’s drama about the experiences of a young girl whose family was torn apart by the Khmer Rouge. While Jolie’s citizenship helped the movie become Cambodia’s Oscar submission this fall, the film was aided by another key figure whose work thrives far from Hollywood — producer Rithy Panh.

Cinephiles have celebrated Panh’s work for decades. The filmmaker, who lost much of his family in the Khmer Rouge genocide, has chronicled modern Cambodian life with a range projects that blur the line between fiction and documentary. His 2013 film “The Missing Picture” combined personal recollections of his family with stop-motion animation to create a thoroughly modern meditation on the reverberations of the past in the present. “She didn’t come to make the film about us,...

Hollywood has been trying to crack the code on video game movies for decades. As far back as the Super Mario Bros. Movie, they’ve had trouble in converting the gameplay-focused stories to the big screen. The closest we’ve had to success have arguably been Warcraft and the Resident Evil films, and even those couldn’t be called runaway hits.

However, if there’s one video game that could take the transition pretty well, it’s Metal Gear Solid. Ever since the PS1 game hit the console, it was quick to establish itself as an incredibly cinematic experience. This trend continued with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of Patriots, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. With each entry, it became all the more obvious that producer Hideo Kojima was working to create cinematic experiences...