Producers Guild of America Announces 2026 Awards Nominees

Posted on January 9, 2026 by admin

We’re officially in that part of awards season where the shortlists matter, and the Producers Guild of America’s nominations offer an early read on which films are actually building momentum.

The PGA has announced the film and television nominees for the 37th Annual Producers Guild Awards, set to take place February 28, 2026, at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The theatrical motion picture lineup includes Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams, and Weapons.

Warner Bros. leads studio representation with three nominated films, followed by Focus Features and Netflix with two apiece, and single entries from Apple and NEON. Notably absent from the list are major franchise sequels like Avatar: Fire and Ash and Wicked: For Good. Aside from Bugonia, a remake, the field leans heavily toward original stories and literary adaptations, continuing a broader awards-season preference for non-franchise titles.

Historically, the PGA’s top prize — the Darryl F. Zanuck Award — has been one of the most reliable Oscar bellwethers, aligning with the Academy Award for Best Picture in 17 of the past 22 years.
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Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis’ Neo-Realist Classic, Returns in a New 4K Restoration

Posted on January 8, 2026 by admin

Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice (1949), one of the most provocative and influential films of Italian neorealism, will screen at Film Forum from January 30 through February 5 in a newly restored 4K edition.

Set during planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, Bitter Rice follows a group of rice-field workers known as the mondine, focusing on an earthy laborer played by Silvana Mangano who becomes entangled with a small-time criminal, portrayed by Vittorio Gassman, and his glamorous accomplice, played by Doris Dowling. The film blends social realism with melodrama, pairing its portrait of grueling manual labor with sex, crime, and moral tension.

Filmed on location with real mondine visible in the background, Bitter Rice stands out even within neorealism for its raw physicality and pulp energy. The film was an early international success for producer Dino De Laurentiis, premiered at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Story the following year.

De Santis, who came up as a critic and screenwriter before directing, was deeply shaped by anti-Fascist film culture in Italy and by his collaborations with figures like Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. Bitter Rice reflects that background, merging political consciousness with a visceral, almost sensational style that helped broaden the reach of neorealism beyond strictly austere realism.

The new 4K restoration offers a rare chance to see Bitter Rice with renewed visual clarity, restoring the texture and immediacy of a film that helped redefine postwar European cinema, and remains strikingly modern in its mix of social critique and genre filmmaking.

IMAX Had Its Biggest Year Ever… and the Movies Driving It Might Surprise You

Posted on January 7, 2026 by admin

Avatar: Fire and Ash
20th Century Studios

IMAX closed out 2025 with the strongest box office performance in its history, pulling in a record $1.28 billion globally. That’s a 40 percent jump over 2024 and even higher than the company’s pre-pandemic peak in 2019, a notable milestone at a time when the broader theatrical business is still finding its footing.

What stands out isn’t just the total, but where the money came from. IMAX’s top-grossing films of the year weren’t dominated by traditional Hollywood blockbusters alone. The biggest title on IMAX screens was Ne Zha 2, a Chinese animated epic that barely registered in North America but became a massive global hit. It was followed by Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1: The Movie from Apple, the anime phenomenon Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

That mix tells a bigger story about how IMAX is positioning itself. The company’s growth is increasingly tied to international audiences, anime fans, and filmmakers who deliberately shoot with IMAX cameras, not just tentpole franchises aimed at U.S. multiplexes. In fact, local-language films accounted for more than $400 million of IMAX’s box office in 2025, a record for the format.
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Rancid-Inspired Film “…And Out Comes the Wolf” Expands Into an Official Graphic Novel Universe

Posted on January 6, 2026 by admin

The upcoming punk-inspired film …And Out Comes the Wolf, based on the music and ethos of Rancid’s landmark 1995 album …And Out Come the Wolves, is expanding beyond the screen with an official graphic novel series produced by Big Newport Studios and Z2.

Adapted by writer and artist Kevin Mellon (Archer, Hit-Monkey) from the film’s screenplay by Danny Peykoff and brothers Jamie and Jason Neese (The Umbrella Academy), the graphic novel aims to deepen the story’s portrait of survival, friendship, and violence in the 1990s East Bay punk scene. The film, which recently wrapped production, is set to premiere at festivals this spring before a theatrical release later this summer.

Both the film and the graphic novel center on two best friends navigating a collapsing city shaped by poverty, drugs, and constant threat, drawing inspiration from the raw energy and working-class urgency that defined Rancid’s music. While rooted in punk culture, the story leans less toward nostalgia and more toward examining how limited choices and escalating danger shape lives on the margins.
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CES 2026 Day One: Robots Everywhere, AI in Everything

Posted on January 6, 2026 by admin

In the early days of CES 2026, AI and robotics are everywhere. Nearly every hall and booth is showing some version of intelligent tech, whether it’s built into hardware, vehicles, or standalone machines.

Humanoid robots from companies like AGIBOT and robotic dogs such as the ROVER X1 are common sights on the show floor, making robotics feel less experimental and more expected this year.

LG is showing both consumer-facing products and behind-the-scenes technology, including its ultra-thin OLED evo W6 wallpaper TV and Actuator AXIUM, a compact motion system tied to future device movement and interaction.

Elsewhere, more practical tech is drawing attention. Maxwheel’s electric scooters point toward everyday mobility, while companies like HBE Energy and ENEOS are focused on infrastructure and energy solutions shaping how connected systems operate at scale.

Tianma Brings Big Screens, Faster Panels, and Car Displays to CES 2026

Posted on January 5, 2026 by admin

At CES 2026, some of the most interesting display tech isn’t coming from consumer-facing brands, but from the companies supplying them behind the scenes. Tianma, a major global display manufacturer, is one of those players, and its appointment-only showcase in the West Hall offers a glimpse at where screens across phones, cars, and gaming setups are headed.

One of the standout demos is a 108-inch 4K Micro-LED display, built using what Tianma calls the world’s first all-laser mass transfer process on a glass backplane. It’s firmly in prototype territory, but it shows how Micro-LED displays are inching closer to becoming larger and more viable beyond lab demos.

Automotive displays are another major focus. Tianma’s Smart Cockpit 7.0 concept leans into the idea of cars as screen-first environments, featuring a nearly 50-inch curved 8K display, wide head-up displays, and dimming glass designed to replace traditional sunshades.
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Oscar-Shortlisted Short Documentary Perfectly a Strangeness Sets NYC Screenings

Posted on January 4, 2026 by admin

Alison McAlpine’s short documentary Perfectly a Strangeness continues its awards-season run with two upcoming New York City screenings in January, following its inclusion on the Academy Awards’ 2026 shortlist for Best Documentary Short.

The 15-minute Canadian film, which premiered in Official Competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in a desert landscape where three donkeys encounter an abandoned astronomical observatory. Blending documentary with elements of myth, science fiction, and philosophical inquiry, the film explores perception, curiosity, and humanity’s relationship to the cosmos through a strikingly sensory approach.

Perfectly a Strangeness has earned significant critical praise, with Deadline calling it “one of the most cinematic documentaries of the year,” and The Film Verdict describing it as “a heady blend of myth, science fiction, documentary, comedy and philosophical exploration.” The film has also screened at TIFF, IDFA, and more than 70 international festivals.

The New York screenings include a January 7 showing at Quad Cinema, followed by a Q&A with critic Jordan Hoffman, and a January 10 screening at DCTV with a post-screening conversation led by filmmaker Penny Lane.

McAlpine, whose previous work includes the acclaimed feature documentary CIELO, is a Guggenheim Fellow and is currently developing her first narrative feature alongside a new hybrid documentary project.

Pre-EVent: CES 2026 Is Almost Here and This Year, It’s Not Just About Gadgets

Posted on January 3, 2026 by admin

CES officially kicks off January 6 in Las Vegas, but the real show starts earlier, as companies begin rolling out press previews, early demos, and carefully timed leaks ahead of the tech industry’s biggest week of the year.

As always, artificial intelligence will be everywhere, but CES 2026 looks less focused on flashy “AI for AI’s sake” demos and more on how that tech shows up in everyday devices. Expect AI baked into laptops, TVs, home gadgets, cars, and even robots that claim to understand you better than last year’s versions did.

The biggest names in chips are once again setting the tone. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su are both slated to keynote, likely framing the next year of AI hardware, gaming performance, and power-efficient computing. Intel is also expected to spotlight its Panther Lake processors, which could quietly shape the next wave of laptops even if they don’t steal headlines.

Beyond chips, CES remains a playground for ambitious concepts, some practical, many not. Robotics is already shaping up as a major theme, with companies like LG teasing home robots and Samsung continuing to hint at long-promised helpers that may or may not ever ship.

TVs are getting bigger, brighter, and more experimental too, with RGB lighting tech and massive display sizes dominating early buzz.

What makes CES different from other tech events isn’t just the product launches, it’s the chaos. For every polished announcement from a tech giant, there’s a startup demoing something strange, brilliant, or confusing just a few booths away. Some of it will define the year ahead. A lot of it won’t. But taken together, CES 2026 offers a snapshot of where the tech industry thinks it’s going, and what it hopes people will want next.

Over the next few days, the real story will emerge not just from the keynotes, but from the show floor, the side rooms, and the unexpected moments that always seem to happen between official announcements.

Michael Jai White, Tyrese Gibson, and Isaiah Washington Star in Oscar Shaw Trailer

Posted on January 3, 2026 by admin

Samuel Goldwyn Films has released the official trailer for Oscar Shaw, a new action thriller starring Michael Jai White alongside Tyrese Gibson and Isaiah Washington. The film is set to arrive in theaters and on digital platforms on January 9.

White plays a retired police detective who takes justice into his own hands after the death of his closest friend, launching a familiar vengeance-driven storyline that places him back on the streets he once swore to protect. Directed by R. Ellis Frazier and Justin Nesbitt, Oscar Shaw leans heavily into genre staples, with shadowy visuals, street-level gunfights, and tough-talking confrontations framing its revenge narrative.

The trailer positions Oscar Shaw squarely within the wave of low-budget, direct-to-VOD action films that White has increasingly headlined in recent years, offering another vehicle for his physical presence and fight choreography rather than a reinvention of the genre. For fans of straightforward revenge thrillers, the film appears to deliver exactly what it promises, with little interest in subverting expectations.

CES 2026: Broadcast TV Is Still Here, and It Might Need Another Box

Posted on January 2, 2026 by admin

Between the massive TVs and AI demos at CES, Pearl TV is showing something much less exciting: a small black box meant to sit next to your TV.

The group announced plans for a NEXTGEN TV converter box that would let people with antennas and older TVs keep watching free local channels as broadcasters move toward ATSC 3.0, the next version of over-the-air TV. If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s basically the same idea as the converter boxes people needed when TV went digital years ago.

The reason it’s back is simple. Not everyone is replacing their TV, and not everyone streams everything. A lot of households still rely on antennas for local news, weather, sports, and emergency alerts. ATSC 3.0 doesn’t work with older TVs, which means those viewers could eventually lose access unless something fills the gap.

At CES, Pearl TV is showing early versions of the box made with companies like Skyworth, a manufacturer behind many mainstream TVs. The pitch isn’t flashy. Plug it in, keep watching, and don’t buy a new TV just yet.

It’s not the kind of thing people stop for selfies with on the show floor. But it’s a quiet reminder that while tech keeps moving fast, a lot of people are still watching TV the same way they always have. And someone still has to make sure it works.