Entertainment

LOS ANGELES, July 9, (Agencies): Nelsan Ellis — famous for his role as Lafayette Reynolds on HBO’s “True Blood” — has passed away at age 39, Variety can confirm. The actor died after complications from heart failure. “We were extremely saddened to hear of the passing of Nelsan Ellis”, HBO …

So-called heroes sling into action just about every weekend of the summer movie season, but if you want to see the genuine article, you’ll have to make your way to “City of Ghosts”, Matthew Heineman’s documentary about the Syrian citizen journalist collective of Raqqa. Raqqa, the provincial Eastern Syrian city …

Redolent of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos” with a soupcon of “Animal Kingdom” and a welcome dose of black humor, “The Line” is an entertaining, fast-paced crime thriller set in the lawless borderlands of the Slovak Republic and Ukraine prior to Slovakia’s accession to the European Union in 2007. Stories …

NEW YORK, July 6, (Agencies): A weird thing happened when the four members of the alt-rock band Imagine Dragons sat down to listen to their new album all the way through. They actually liked it. “This was the first record that I think after we created it and we listened …

A fatal, off-screen car crash interrupts the picturesque, suburban lives of a young married couple in David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” marooning the deceased husband musician (Casey Affleck) in a kind of purgatory as a watchful, mostly benign ghost. The movie is, inevitably, “the one where Casey Affleck spends most …

LOS ANGELES, July 4, (RTRS): Tunisian auteur Mohamed Ben Attia, whose first feature “Hedi” won best debut and best actor honors at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, is set to shoot a timely drama titled “Weldi,” about a Tunisian father coming to terms with his son joining ISIS. Paris-based Luxbox …

NEW YORK, July 4, (AFP): Jay-Z’s upstart Tidal streaming service has enjoyed a surge of interest after the rap mogul released his latest album exclusively on the platform. Tidal — which Jay-Z acquired in 2015 but trails far behind streaming leader Spotify as well as Apple Music — has seen …

When you see home-movie footage from, say, the 1940s, the images look old, but the people in them appear, more or less, to inhabit the same universe that we do. But when you see documentary footage from the late 19th century, it has an entirely different, slightly spooky not-of-this-world quality. …

‘I’ll … your mother, Taleban,” jeers a surly 17-year-old through straggly pink ombre highlights to a brown-skinned catcaller in Stephan Lacant’s provocative and propulsive sophomore feature “Strange Daughter.” It might seem a long way from there — plus jibes about headscarves and bomb-making — to the sight of the same …

LOS ANGELES, July 3, (RTRS): Uma Thurman is best known for Quentin Tarantino movies “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill,” and during an onstage interview at Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Sunday she spoke of the positive impact the latter film has had on women. “Women would come up to me …