LIFESTYLE

China Film Co. Ltd., the largest film distributor in China, has invested in two forthcoming movies from Legendary Entertainment, the Burbank-based film finance and production company. Legendary East, an affiliated company of Legendary Entertainment, said on Monday afternoon that China Film Co. made "an over eight figure equity investment" in the films "Seventh Son" and "Warcraft." If the pictures are approved for release in China, China Film Co. will distribute them there. Universal Pictures, with whom Legendary Entertainment has a distribution and marketing pact, will release the movies in the U.S.; "Seventh Son" is slated to come out Feb. 6, 2015, and "Warcraft" on March 11, 2016. Legendary Entertainment's credits include the "Dark Knight" and "Hangover" trilogies, and last summer's "Man of Steel." Legendary East, which has offices in Beijing and Hong Kong, was formed in 2011. Legendary East and C...

Considered deeply uncool at one point, music from animated movies is back — and singing along is now not only OK for kids, it's something adults record themselves doing on their phones and share on YouTube. The boom in popular songs from animated movies comes after a long fallow period when the form yielded few hits in the music world, despite box-office juggernauts like the "Toy Story," "Shrek" and "Ice Age" franchises. Though all incorporated music in their films, it was rarely the kind that had come to define the genre at Disney Animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was making music-driven hits like "The Lion King," "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid." "You had this shift ... where there were very successful animated movies but their soundtracks weren't," said Ken Bunt, president of Disney Music Group. "Their scores were important, but they weren't musicals and the music...

Over a 20-year career making stylized, often genre-tinged films, Danny Boyle has been known to look at a well-worn area in new and dynamic ways. With a potential Steve Jobs movie, he could be taking on a worthy subject. The British auteur is in talks to helm Sony Pictures' much-buzzed, sometimes-bumpy Jobs biopic that "The Social Network" scribe Aaron Sorkin has adapted from Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography, The Times has confirmed. Boyle would replace David Fincher, the "Social Network" director who appears to have moved off the project. According to the Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the Boyle news, the director has also approached Leonardo DiCaprio, whom he directed in "The Beach," to portray Jobs. Unlike a traditional biopic, the Sorkin script is said to look at a few key moments in the iconoclast's career rather than a more cradle-to-grave approach. A Sony Pictures spokesman declined to comment on any director or actor t...

Authorized biopics are rarely the most juicy or revealing films. But what happens in the opposite instance, when‎ the family of your subject actively doesn't want a movie and is willing and eager to share that sentiment with the world? That's the situation that James Ponsoldt's "The End of the Tour," a look at the late acclaimed writer David Foster Wallace starring Jason Segel, finds itself in. Ponsoldt's movie, based on reporting from magazine writer and novelist David Lipsky, recently finished shooting and is about to enter the editing room. But a statement from Wallace's family‎ makes it clear they aren't happy with any of that. The estate's objection, the statement said, is that family members were not brought into the process and that Lipsky's material was never intended nor approved for film adaptat “The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, David's family, and David's longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company wish to make it cl...

Clint Eastwood's latest movie, "American Sniper," kicked off with a bang in Los Angeles County this week. The Warner Bros. film, which stars Bradley Cooper as a Navy SEAL who recounts his military exploits, began 10 days of filming Monday in an Afghan village set at the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in the Santa Clarita area. The scenes involved "simulated warfare sequences with full load automatic gunfire, explosions, squibs, bullet hits, smoke, burning debris," according to a county film permit. The movie is the latest in a flurry of feature films with small to mid-size budgets shooting in L.A. with the benefit of state film tax credits. ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll Other state-qualified projects that filmed in L.A. this year have included the Warner Bros. films "Entourage" and "Horrible Bosses 2," helping to fuel a 24% increase in location film shoots in the first quarter of the year, according to a recent report from FilmL.A. Inc., which ...

Fran Kranz in Joss Whedon's movie "Much Ado About Nothing." (Elsa William Shakespeare, whose 450th birthday is being celebrated around the world Wednesday, never seems to go out of vogue for movie directors eager to put their own spin on his classic texts. Most of Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for the big screen multiple times over, ranging from faithful (Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet") to wildly unconventional (Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet"). Because Shakespeare's plays exist in the public domain, adapting them for the movies is an economical way of co-opting some literary prestige. In the past 20 years or so, the unconventional appears to have outnumbered the faithful. Ian McKellen's "Richard III" took place in a Third Reich-style regime; Julie Taymor set "Titus Andronicus" in a postmodern mashup of ancient Rome and present day; and Kenneth Branagh adapted "Love's Labour's Lost" as an o...

As in many a thriller, the helpful stranger in "The German Doctor" turns out to be a monster. In this case, he's no run-of-the-mill sadist but Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death, and he finds prime subjects for experimentation in an Argentine family. The drama by Lucía Puenzo, adapting her novel "Wakolda," is a credible imagining of a brief period in Mengele's South American exile. The what-if conceit is intriguing enough not to be undone by increasingly heavy-handed symbolism. Alex Brendemühl imbues the role of the notorious physician with a creepy rectitude, especially in his obsession with 12-year-old Lilith (exceptional newcomer Florencia Bado). When they first meet, the image of his gloved hand around her doll conveys plenty. Using the name Helmut Gregory, he presents himself as a geneticist to the girl's parents (Natalia Oreiro and Diego Peretti) and installs himself in their lakeside hotel, the better to push his growth-hormone treatmen...