"Dozhd — also known as TV Rain — had been fined earlier this month for airing a map labeling Crimea as Russian territory, and calling Russian forces 'our army.'" The head of Latvia's broadcast regulator attributed the revocation to "threats to national security and public order. ... Everyone should respect Latvian law." - Politico
This week the company launches ITVX, a free, ad-supported streaming service. The plan is to offer 10,000 hours of content, including new material, in order to attract more viewers (and charge more for ads), but some observers think ITVX could simply cannibalize the network's existing broadcast audience. - The Hollywood Reporter
"For all the clouds of publicity, moviemaking is an artisanal business with a craft base. How you light, shoot, edit, even make deals — all these things have more in common with candle-making and knitting than they do with creating art in the romantic, visionary sense." - The New Yorker
FRAN uses this information to come up with a prediction about which areas of a real person’s face would age and how and then overlays the new details onto video footage. The result is “the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images.” - The Verge
"Though the first Avatar was the world’s top-grossing movie not once, but twice, reclaiming the title from Avengers: Endgame after a 2021 rerelease in China, its most oft-cited claim to fame is its surprising lack of cultural impact." Why? - The New York Times
Trendy? Flat characters (yes, even more so than the straight characters in the heterocentric holiday movies)? Or something that shows networks' long-awaited embrace of Christmas movie equality? - Washington Post
Doesn't seem super likely. But: "If there’s a Best Actor race worth trying to sneak into, it’s this one, and Smith has been careful to cut a penitent figure on the campaign trail." - Vulture
Maybe HBO wasn't quite ready for a show that is creators couldn't even describe. "Imagine 'Scooby-Doo' as written by Jorge Luis Borges and directed by Pedro Almodóvar and you can begin to approximate the vibe." - Los Angeles Times
It’s a CBC mandate to find creators they haven’t spoken with before and to encourage those stories to be told through a variety of opportunities and programs that further develop talent. - Variety
The once-a-decade list of the top 100 films from Sight and Sound magazine has nudged 2012's champion, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, down to runner-up status and crowned Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (Citizen Kane, which topped the list for decades, is now third.) - The Hollywood Reporter
"The cuts, CEO John Lansing says, are due to a sharp drop in sponsor revenue and represent approximately 3% of NPR's current annual budget." No layoffs are planned. - Inside Radio
The broadcaster also said it would try to attract viewers from lower socio-economic groups by making sports documentaries and crime shows, after criticism from Ofcom that these audiences are more likely to watch commercial outlets such as ITV. - The Guardian
"Everyone seems happy to have Brendan Fraser back. Which prompts a question: Why? He never actually went away. The truth is that we've come back to him. But that's not the story we like to tell ourselves." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"I hate explaining this stuff." Yet explain he does — why the end credits are at the beginning, and what he was up to with that brutal master class scene. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
