The Venice film festival opens on Wednesday with "Black Swan," starring Natalie Portman as a ballet dancer in New York whose position is threatened when a beautiful newcomer arrives.

The thriller, directed by Darren Aronofsky, officially kicks off the annual celebration of cinema on the Lido waterfront where stars, fans and reporters rub shoulders for 11 days.

Festival director Marco Mueller has opted for youth in his choice of directors of the 23 competition films, and he will also hope that the presence of Hollywood mavericks can make up for the expected shortage of A-list celebrities this year.

Jury president Quentin Tarantino, who must ultimately decide who walks away with the coveted Golden Lion award at the closing ceremony on September 11, said his time on the picturesque island would be more work than play.

"There's a lot of really exciting movies, exciting directors. It's a fantastic line-up," he told Reuters on arrival. "I'm keen with anticipation.

"I've been on a few juries and I love it. It's a joy to me. But it's work. We're not here for vacation."

Venice, the world's oldest film festival and one of its most prestigious, has long been looking over its shoulder at Canadian rival Toronto, with which it overlaps and which is seen as cheaper and more business-focused than the Italian event.

The competition has intensified, as many movies with world premieres in Venice hit Toronto just days later and others go straight to the Canadian festival.

Mueller said he believed the two events could continue to exist side-by-side.

Piranha 3D bosses have started work on a sequel, after the film was a killer hit at the box office.

The Alexandre Aja film, which stars Richard Dreyfuss, Elisabeth Shue and Kelly Brook, took 10 million US dollars on its opening weekend in the States.

Heat Vision reports that, buoyed by this success, producers have already started work on a follow-up.

Producer Mark Canton said: "We are thrilled that audiences are not just loving Piranha 3D, but cheering for it. And it's fantastic that so many critics are really getting the movie and recommending it. We can't wait to get to work on the sequel."

"The Expendables, Number 1 at the Box Office--"Vampire Sucks" Film 2nd (Trailer)

"The Expendables" in back to back weeks is number 1 (one) at the box office, taking in over $16 million, Saturday.  A vampire spoof of a film, "Vampire Sucks", in fact, did suck, but came in second to Stallone's macho "Man-Law" film.  "Eat Pray Love" with Julia Roberts faired well.

"The Expendables" led at the box office

"The Expendables has placed Stallone, best known for his roles in "Rambo", back on the Hollywood radar with this, nearly, all-man mercenary film.  Giselle Itie breaks up the bubbling cauldrons of testosterone to add a different dynamic to the movie.

Essentially, without spoiling the plot, the star-studded casted movie is about a band of aging men....eh hem, and woman mercenaries who are retained to track down and overthrow a South American Dictator.

The Dictator turns out to be a ruthless Drug Lord, and the tables turn on them, as they fight for their lives.  More like a suicide mission.  Good stuff, right?

According to Reuters, "The Expendables" represented the largest opening of Stallone's professional career in film, since "Spy Kids 3D" seven years ago.

Rumors abounded that the action-movie star was dwindling into star oblivion, as evidence by his tanked showing of Rambo (modern version) last year.  The hype was there, but the iPod generation didn't buy it.

David Pitz, president of distribution for Lions Gate Films, said the movie should do very well with males who have come out in big numbers, representing the film's "core group", he said.

The Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival kicked off its 5 day festival last night with a great audience pleaser, Venezuelan film by first time director (and writer), Marcel Rasquin, HERMANO, audience and jury prize winner from Moscow FF and rumored to be headed toward Telluride.  The international sales agent EuropaCorp (whose Luc Besson was president of the Moscow jury when the film won Moscow International Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden George), was uncertain that it wanted the film to show in this festival where it had been promised before EuropaCorp was in the picture.  But the filmmaker must have prevailed and a packed house at Mann’s Grauman Chinese was lucky to see this great film. HERMANO tells the story of an exceptional soccer player and his team’s captain and a born leader who have been raised as brothers, and who play football in their slum. The opportunity of their lives arrives when a soccer scout invites them to try out with the city’s best team but tragedy intervenes bringing everything back to the soccer field, where they must choose what is more important: family, revenge or their lifelong dreams. The film stars Eliú Armas, Fernando Moreno, Gonzalo Cubero, Marcela Girón, great soccer players as well as actors.

BEIJING — First you see a tremendous swarm of dragonflies, which is one of those odd natural phenomena believed to prefigure an earthquake. Then there are some modest scenes of domestic life in the Chinese city of Tangshan on July 27, 1976. An unsuspecting brother and sister squabble over a single tomato, until their mother settles the dispute by giving it to the boy.

Then at 3:42 a.m. on July 28, unmitigated disaster strikes.

Buildings shake, the earth splits apart, bricks, concrete slabs and roofs cascade downward as a city of one million people is reduced to rubble in the space of 23 seconds. Among the victims are the two children we’ve already met, pinioned under a concrete slab, covered in dust, their lives ebbing away.

So begins what is certainly the movie event of the year in China, and possibly the movie event of all time, commercially speaking, in this country. Called “Aftershock” in English, the movie depicts with impressive, extremely realistic special effects the devastating earthquake that hit the city of Tangshan 34 years ago, killing 240,000 people. More important, it then follows the emotional and psychological impact the disaster had on one family over the next three decades.

“Aftershock,” directed by Feng Xiaogang, one of China’s most successful commercial directors, is being hailed as an emotional tour de force — or, depending on how you feel about it, a tearjerker of the first order.

“You have to be very strong to see it, because it’s so realistic,” wrote one blogger, who identified himself as a survivor of the Tangshan disaster. “The movie makes you understand how precious life is.”

Days after reportedly dropping out of the Nicole Kidman film Trespass, Nicolas Cage has returned to the project, according to Deadline.com.

Cage abruptly pulled out of the film last week — just two weeks before production was scheduled to start in Louisiana — after being locked into a $7 million deal, reports Deadline.

The actor was originally cast to play Kidman's husband in the film, which revolves around a couple kidnapped by thieves. Cage later switched roles to play the leader of the kidnappers before dropping out, according to Deadline.

Deadline is now reporting that Cage will return to the Joel Schumacher-directed project in the husband role.

Calls and emails to Millennium Films and Cage's rep was not immediately returned.

The Walt Disney Company agreed late Thursday to sell Miramax Films to an investor group for about $660 million, but the art film unit will not be out of Disney’s hair for another year.

In selling Miramax to a group that includes the construction executive Ronald N. Tutor, Disney agreed to distribute films from the studio and its library for as long as a year, said people who had been briefed on the deal and spoke on condition of anonymity to keep from disrupting it.

The distribution agreement promises to shore up the Tutor group as it completes financing arrangements — which include equity and bank debt — for a purchase that is priced considerably higher than other bidders were willing to pay.

Potential buyers as highly motivated as Bob and Harvey Weinstein — the brothers who founded Miramax three decades ago and sold it to Disney in 1993 — for months had argued that Miramax and its 700-film library, which includes “Chicago” and “No Country for Old Men,” was worth less than $600 million in the face of steadily falling home video revenue.

Neither Mr. Tutor nor Thomas J. Barrack Jr., the chief executive of Colony Capital, which joined Mr. Tutor in the purchase, responded to queries on Friday.

But one person who was briefed on the transaction said the group was relying on $50 million in cash that would come with Miramax and receivables valued at slightly less than half the purchase price. The price is about four times the company’s annual cash flow.

Disney said the transaction, which must comply with federal antitrust regulations, was expected to close between Sept. 10 and Dec. 31.

A long lost Hollywood silent film featuring Charlie Chaplin is to be screened for the first time in nearly a century after being discovered at an antiques fair.

The comedy called A Thief Catcher was made in 1914 and was missing for so many years that Chaplin's appearance in it as a buffoon policeman had been forgotten.

The 10-minute movie was discovered by the American cinema historian, Paul Gierucki, who bought a can of old film marked "Keystone" at an antiques sale in Michigan.
 
He assumed it was just another Keystone Cops movie and didn't watch the 16mm reel for months.

When he finally looked at the film, which is in good condition, he was amazed to see what looked like Chaplin emerging from the bushes in a police uniform, several sizes too big, armed with a nightstick.

Mr Gierucki couldn't tell immediately but the actor's distinctive twitches seemed to confirm that it was Chaplin playing a minor role in one of his earliest films.

He showed it to a fellow film collector, Richard Roberts, who said: "I looked at it two seconds and said 'Yep, it's Chaplin.' Even though he's dressed as a cop, the rest of the character is still there – the moustache, the walk, the mannerism. This is a character he'd been doing for quite a while."

In the film Chaplin, who had yet to become famous, uses physical gestures that he would later employ for his most memorable, bumbling character The Tramp. After wiggling and shrugging in a way familiar to millions of filmgoers he delivers some instant slapstick justice by knocking around a group of hooligans.

The movie was made by Mack Sennett for his Keystone film company which produced a series of films about a group of incompetent policemen, the Keystone Cops, between 1912 and 1917.

"Despicable Me" had a sensational debut at the box office, taking in a studio-estimated $60.1 million and easily surpassing the second weekend of "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," which dropped 49% to $33.4 million and is playing virtually even with the last "Twilight" movie, "New Moon."

"Predators," the other newbie at the box office this weekend, opened to $25.3 million, a strong start given its modest budget.

But "Despicable Me" was the big box-office news, as the 3-D movie far outpaced expectations based on pre-release surveys and marked a fantastic start for Universal Pictures in the competitive animated family film business. It was the biggest-ever opening for an original animated movie not made by Pixar or DreamWorks Animation, putting Universal's Illumination Entertainment family films unit among the top players in its space.

It was also a notable opening, given that "Toy Story 3" is still doing solid business. That film and "The Last Airbender" took up a number of the nation's 3-D screens, leaving "Despicable Me" with only 1,551 theaters that played the movie in 3-D, about 800 fewer than other recent 3-D movies have enjoyed.

Universal's marketing campaign, which focused on a little, yellow and adorable crew of supporting characters, appeared to strike a chord with animation fans of all ages, as an unusually high 45% of ticket buyers were not families with children younger than 12. Those who saw the movie loved it, giving it an average grade of A, according to market research firm CinemaScore, foreshadowing a long box-office run that could easily take it to more than $150 million in the U.S. and Canada.