Financing for Steven Spielberg's partnership with one of India's richest men was finalized Monday, giving the legendary Hollywood director money to resume making movies. The deal with Anil Ambani, chairman of India's Reliance BIG Entertainment, provides Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios with $875 million, coming from Ambani, the Walt Disney Co. and loans made by a syndicate of banks. Disney will distribute and market Spielberg's films around the world, with the exception of India, where Reliance will have those rights. The DreamWorks ...

Sometimes bad breaks can bring great fortune. A few years ago, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings movies, planned a big-screen version of the Halo video-game universe and tapped Neill Blomkamp to direct it. When that project collapsed after a few months, Jackson proposed that Blomkamp turn his science-fiction short Alive in Joburg into his first feature film. It would be set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, focus on the country's traumatic tradition of apartheid, have characters who ...

In what feels like a box-office weekend from "The Twilight Zone," a low-budget and critically acclaimed movie with no stars and an unknown director managed to top the charts. "District 9," the alien action pic produced by Peter Jackson and directed by the 29-year-old Neill Blomkamp who shot the film in Johannesburg, South Africa, of all places -- crushed the competition by grossing $37 million, according to early estimates. Audiences clearly enjoyed what ...

While Hurricane Gustav was chewing up Cuba and storming toward Louisiana, the screen of the Venice Film Festival's Sala Grande was showing a very sweet tsunami. In the animated movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the swelling waves take the form of dolphins, and when a Japanese coastal village gets submerged no one is killed or hurt — just amusingly displaced. The rising up of the marine world is not insurrection against humanity but gently cautionary ...

Few people would have pegged Marie-Laure Picat as a likely heroine. The portly, plain-looking 37-year-old lived quietly in a village in central France, shunned attention, and said her only real quirk was an adoration of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. But on Aug. 10, when it was revealed that Picat had died the previous day, most of France spared a thought — and shed a tear — for the mother who spent what she knew would be the last ...

Anne Frank's account of hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, published posthumously in English as "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," has moved millions of readers across the decades. This fall countless more American schoolchildren will be introduced to Frank's chronicle, and for many of them it will be their first exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust. "As long as humankind exists this will be one of the most widely read and ...

North American movie theaters served as the field of combat for two action figures from '60s TV: the Hasbro toy soldier G.I. Joe and the animated "French chef" Julia Child. The raw box-office count suggests an overwhelming victory for the would-be blockbuster. Behind the numbers, though, was evidence of a standoff, with each side able to claim victory. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra took in $56.2 million, according to ...

One of the few smart things about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was the decision made by Paramount Pictures to refuse to screen the movie for the press. The studio's previous summer toy story, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, had earned a sheaf of pans, then took in more than $800 million in its first six weeks of release. Hoping lightning would strike twice, but without the annoying critical thunder, Paramount showed G.I. Joe, which it hopes ...

Meryl Streep remains a wonder. With her voice riding precariously up and down the scales like a tipsy soloist, Streep brings aplomb and gusto to her sympathetic comic take on the august mother hen of TV cooks, Julia Child, in the new "Julie & Julia." The performance goes well beyond caricature in its expressivity and exhilarating idiosyncrasy. It's another feather -- an ostrich plume -- in the actress's bountiful cap. It's too bad that "Julie & Julia," which alternates the ...

The new Judd Apatow movie carried the perky title Funny People, but audiences quickly figured out it should really be called The Guy Who Thinks He's Gonna Die and Isn't Very Nice. Or Funny. It managed a decent $8.7 million on opening day, dropped 15% on Saturday and is expected to finish the weekend at $23.4 million. The good news for Apatow and his long-ago roomie Adam Sandler is that their film topped the weekend box office at domestic ...