The Disney blockbuster, featuring a string of Marvel superheroes out to save the universe from powerful purple alien Thanos (Josh Brolin), has a cumulative three-week take of $548.1 million, according to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Returning to their Marvel roles in the film are Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Chris Hemsworth as Thor.

Running a distant second with what normally would be a respectable $17.9 million was “Life of the Party,” a Melissa McCarthy comedy in its first weekend out.

McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with her husband, the movie’s director Ben Falcone, stars as a newly divorced mother who returns to college, where her daughter is in her senior year.

Another new film, “Breaking In,” a thriller starring Gabrielle Union, was third at $17.6 million.

Review website Rotten Tomatoes dismissed the film as a “rote, disposable action thriller” but praised Union’s performance as a mother fighting to save her children from criminal hostage-takers.

Rom-com “Overboard” slipped from second to fourth place with a box office take of $9.9 million in its second weekend in theaters. The Lionsgate remake, starring Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez, is about a struggling single mother who persuades a rich playboy with amnesia that they are married.

Number five at the box office was Paramount’s sci-fi horror film “A Quiet Place,” which stars actor-director John Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt as a couple silently struggling to protect their family from blind aliens that track their prey by sound. It made $6.5 million.

Rounding out the top ten were:

“I Feel Pretty” ($3.8 million)

“Rampage” ($3.5 million)

“Tully” ($2.2 million)

“Black Panther” ($2.1 million)

“RBG” ($1.2)

“Us & Them” started its theatrical run in China and is currently at the top of the Chinese box office chart having taken close to US$200 in just 10 days.

“At Netflix we believe great stories transcend borders. We are always in search for great content that touches the audience’s hearts and we are thrilled to bring a beautiful film like ‘Us & Them’ to the service.” says Rob Roy, Vice President, Content (Asia) at Netflix.

“Us & Them” started as a short story written by its Liu, who decided to bring the story to live on screen,

“Us & Them” follows the story of Lin Jianqing (Jing Boran) and Fang Xiaoxiao (Zhou Dongyu) spanning 10 years. The two first meet and fall in love on the train back home for Chinese New Year, struggle as a couple and eventually lead to break up.  Ten years later, they reunited on a flight home.

Written and directed by Sundance Grand Prize Winner and Emmy nominee Jennifer Fox, viewers in Thailand will be able to watch it on on HBO GO via AIS Play and AIS Playbox.

“The Tale” chronicles one woman’s powerful investigation into her own childhood memories, as she is forced to reexamine her first sexual experience – and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

It’s the first narrative feature from Fox, whose documentary films have earned international acclaim for their groundbreaking artistry and unflinching honesty. Based on Fox’s own life story, “The Tale” sees the filmmaker bravely pushing forward the boundaries of conventional storytelling, creating a dialogue between past and present to illustrate the interplay between memory and trauma.

“My goal was not to ask, ‘did this happen?’ because I always remembered it,” she explains. “It was, ‘how and why did it happen, and how and why did I spin it as a positive story to myself?’ There was a lightbulb moment when I was making another film about women all around the world, and it seemed that every other woman – regardless of class, culture or colour – had an abuse story to tell. Their stories just floored me, because they had a paradigm that looked like my story. Suddenly, I couldn’t see it as my own private little narrative and knew that it was time to investigate what happened in the open space of a fictional film.”

An accomplished documentarian working in New York, Jennifer (Dern) is completing her latest project about the lives of women around the world. She receives a series of phone calls from her mother, Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has found a short story Jennifer wrote at age 13, in which she describes various encounters with her riding instructor, Mrs G (Elizabeth Debicki), and her running coach, Bill (Jason Ritter), while at summer camp. Nettie is unnerved by the implications of her daughter’s writing, but Jennifer is nonplussed. She has always looked back with fondness on the time she spent with these two charismatic adults.

Egged on by Nettie and encouraged by her supportive fiance (Common), Jennifer yearns to know more and sets out on a journey, 30 years later, to find those people from her past – the children, now adults, who also attended the camp back then – and eventually the coaches themselves.

But the more she learns, the more her memories shift and the more questions she unearths. As Jennifer’s frustration mounts, she finds herself turning inward to get to the truth, imagining conversations with her 13yearold self (Isabelle Nelisse) and even Mrs G and Bill in an effort to understand how and why events occurred so long ago.

Tapping into a wave of nostalgia, the series premiere episode — released on May 2 — has more than 20 million views so far, the Google-owned company said.

“Cobra Kai” is a major victory for YouTube, which hoped to use the series both to draw new customers to its $10-a-month streaming service, YouTube Red, which was launched in 2015, and to position itself in the competitive original content market.

The first two episodes of the show were made available for free, to lure viewers.

Filming of season two, which again will feature the star of the original film, Ralph Macchio, will begin later this year. The episodes will go online in 2019.

The series — still set in the Los Angeles suburbs — is a comedy, and it’s told not from the perspective of Daniel LaRusso (Macchio), the bullied teen hero who learns karate from a martial arts master, but that of his nemesis Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka).

Of course, both Daniel and Johnny are well into middle age, and Johnny reopens the Cobra Kai karate dojo.

YouTube Red is now available in five countries — the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea — but YouTube says it will reach dozens more by year’s end.

In countries where YouTube Red is not available, episodes of “Cobra Kai” can be purchased directly on YouTube, or via Google Play.

“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” which gets its US release on May 25, tells the coming-of-age story of smuggler Han Solo before he was the galaxy’s most iconic and adored scoundrel.

The glittering array of stars in Hollywood Boulevard included cast members Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandie Newton and Paul Bettany.

“I just approached it as another adventure happening at a different time in Chewbacca’s life,” said Joonas Suotamo, the six foot 10 inch (2.08-meter) Finnish basketballer who took over the part from Peter Mayhew, starting with “The Force Awakens” (2015).

“It was interesting to approach this time when Chewbacca doesn’t know Han, he doesn’t know all these people, he’s in a really bad spot and he’s looking for a way out.”

The Lucasfilm grandees in attendance included “Solo” director Ron Howard, studio chief Kathleen Kennedy and long-time “Star Wars” writer Lawrence Kasdan and composer John Williams.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg as Hollywood’s A-list — “Star Wars” alumni or otherwise — turned out for the second in the “anthology” series of spin-off films that started in 2016 with “Rogue One.”

Among them was Mark Hamill, Ewan McGregor, Sofia Vergara, Alexandra Daddario, Benjamin Bratt and Johnny Knoxville.

The Disney-owned Lucasfilm delighted fans in April with a sneak peak of the first meeting between Alden Ehrenreich’s young Solo and Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian.

Scenes from the movie showed the pair’s encounter in a sleazy dive bar on a snowbound world, watched by a colorful menagerie of new alien characters.

There was also a glimpse of what looked like the pivotal moment in “Star Wars” lore when Han beats Lando in a card game to win the Millennium Falcon starship, a full-size version of which was contructed for the premiere.

From an African-American detective infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan to Kurdish female fighters battling jihadists, here are the movies that will compete for the top Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes film festival, which started Tuesday:

“Everybody Knows”

Iranian master Asghar Farhadi kicks off the festival with a psychological thriller about a family reunion going awry, featuring Spanish stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. While Farhadi, 45, won an Oscar and the Golden Bear at Berlin for his 2011 breakthrough film, “A Separation”, he is yet to take home the coveted Cannes prize.

“Black Klansman”

US director and activist Spike Lee’s drama is based on the real-life story of an African-American police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1978. John David Washington plays him with Adam Driver as his Jewish police partner. The film will open in the US on the first anniversary of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville where an antiracism activist was killed.

“Under the Silver Lake”

Four years after giving Cannes audiences nightmares with his thriller “It Follows”, David Robert Mitchell returns with another spine-chiller, this time about the mysterious murder of a billionaire.

“Dogman”

Italian director Matteo “Gomorra” Garrone’s new work is not for the faint-hearted. Dubbed an “urban Western”, the film is inspired by the gruesome murder by dog groomer and cocaine addict Pietro De Negri in the late 1980s.

“Three Faces”

Little is known about this portrait of three women by the Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi, who is banned from travel by Tehran. The festival and US director Oliver Stone have pleaded with the authorities to let the director, who has faced years of harassment and arrest, fly to Cannes to show his film.

“Leto”

Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov is another director who may not be able to present his work at Cannes. Under house arrest over highly disputed allegations of embezzlement, his film focuses on Soviet rock star Viktor Tsoi and the birth of Russian underground music in the 1980s.

“At War”

As France grapples with rail strikes and student protests, French director Stephane Brize’s gritty drama about factory workers battling to keep their jobs may hit a timely nerve.

“Cold War”

Amazon Studios is pinning its hopes on this tender black-and-white period romance set among the members of a touring folk group in the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s from Oscar-winning Polish-British director Pawel Pawlikowski.

“The Image Book”

Cinema’s oldest and most enigmatic rebel, French-Swiss legend Jean-Luc Godard, has let little slip about his new film other than this enigmatic synopsis: “Nothing but silence, nothing but a revolutionary song, a story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.”

“Girls of the Sun”

Kurdish women fighters battling the Islamic State are at the centre of French actor-director Eva Husson’s new film. Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani plays Bahar, the leader of the Yazidi Sun Brigade, who hunts down the extremists who had earlier captured her.

“The Wild Pear Tree”

Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palme d’Or four years ago for “Winter Sleep”, is back with another Anatolian talkie, this time about a young provincial writer raging at his father.

“Ayka”

Kazakh Sergey Dvortsevoy – who won many fans and prizes for his 2009 debut “Tulpan” – was a late entry with his new docudrama about a young homeless single mother adrift in the post-Soviet Central Asian state.

“Capernaum”

Lebanese actress-turned-filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s third film is set in a Middle Eastern town. Her previous film “Where Do We Go Now?” premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section in 2010.

“Burning”

South Korean auteur Lee Changdong’s new mystery drama is drawn from a short story by Japanese master Haruki Murakami, “Barn Burning”, about a writer who becomes fascinated by a woman whose boyfriend burns barns. His first film in eight years, the cult director of “Oasis” and “Secret Sunshine” has an almost fanatical following.

“Knife + Heart”

French singer and actress Vanessa Paradis stars in the latest tale from Yann Gonzalez, who had a hit on the festival circuit with his quirky orgy drama, “You And The Night”, with Beatrice Dalle and former footballer Eric Cantona.

“Asako 1 & 2”

In this Japanese drama by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a young woman meets her first love in Osaka. When he disappears without a trace, she moves on – until his perfect double shows up two years later.

“Shoplifters”

Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a long-time sweetheart of the Cannes jury, returns with a tale of a family of small-time crooks who take in a child they find on the street.

“Yomeddine”

A Coptic leper and his orphaned apprentice leave the confines of their colony for the first time and embark on a journey across Egypt to search for what is left of their families.

“Happy As Lazzaro”

Rising star Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, already a prize winner at Cannes, is back with a time-travelling story which takes in the fascist 1930s.

“Sorry Angel”

The new film by Christophe Honore, the man behind the charming French musical “Love Songs”, is a gay love story when the Aids epidemic was at its height.

“Ash Is Purest White”

Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new film is a story of “violent love” between a mobster and a dancer starring Zhao Tao and Liao Fan. It is a followup to his “Mountains May Depart”, which also competed for the Palme d’Or in 2015.

Kincsem is the name of the most famous thoroughbred racehorse in Hungary, which became a national icon (“Kincsem” means “My Treasure” in Hungarian). It won fame around the world for not losing a single one of its 54 races, in the 1870’s – a record that has still not been broken, globally. It’s known the world over, as the “Miracle Horse”.

Many books and tributes have been written about the legendary horse, and it took director Gabor Herendi seven years to write the script of this unique movie. The movie portrays the pulsating life of horse racing, and within it, a stormy love story between two rivals woven into the political fabric of the country.

In the opening scene, aristocratic horse trainer Sando Blaskovich is shot dead by his former military comrade Count Otto von Oettingen, after the Hungarian Revolution. A witness to the murder, Blaskovich’s young son Erno loses everything including his palatial family home, which now becomes the property of his father’s slayer.

The film jumps 20 years, when Erno has become a dandy and womaniser, who frequents the top brothels of the country. He is a happy-go-lucky man, even though he is always short of money.

Erno’s life changes, when he encounters Kara, the tough and spirited daughter of Count Oettingen, and Kincsem, a wild and seemingly untameable horse. And while he is taming the horse and making him a world champion, he falls in love with Klara and plots his revenge on the man who murdered his dad.

The screening of “Kincsem-Bet for Revenge” is supported by the Embassy of Hungary, which will serve snacks and drinks. Hungarian ambassador Dr Peter Jakab will introduce the film.

Entry is Bt20 and reservations can be made at Error! Hyperlink reference not valid., by email to yuttinai@tkpark.or.th and filmforum17@gmail.com or by going to the website http://www.TKPark.or.th.

Los Angeles police said the gold and red suit worn by Robert Downey Jr. in the original 2008 superhero smash hit was reported missing on Tuesday from a storage facility.

Officer Christopher No told AFP the owners of the warehouse believe the iconic costume, valued at $325,000 (274,000 euros), vanished between February and April 25 from the prop storage warehouse in Pacoima, located north of downtown Los Angeles.

No said the “unusual” theft was considered high priority, and detectives so far had no leads in the case.

 Set in Scandinavia six years after a brutal virus carried by the rain wipes out almost all humans, Danish teen siblings Simone (Alba August) and Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen) emerge from the safety of their bunker to find all remnants of civilisation gone. Soon they join a group of young survivors and together set out on a danger-filled quest through an abandoned Scandinavia to search for any sign of life.

Set free from their collective past and societal rules, the group has the freedom to be who they want to be. In their struggle for survival, they discover that even in a post-apocalyptic world there’s still love, jealousy, and many of the coming-of-age dilemmas they thought they’d left behind with the disappearance of the world they once knew.

“The Rain” is created by Jannik Tai Mosholt, Esben Toft Jacobsen and Christian Potalivo.

In a year dominated by the #MeToo movement, the Cannes film festival – which starts Tuesday – is feeling the heat to address glaring gender imbalances in the competition for its top prize, the Palme d’Or. But the numbers show the festival still has some way to go in the battle of the sexes.

– And the winner is… –

Of the 268 filmmakers who have claimed one of Cannes’ top three prizes, only 11 – or four percent – have been women, an analysis by AFP shows.

New Zealand’s Jane Campion remains the only female director to have received the highest accolade, the Palme d’Or, awarded for her masterpiece “The Piano” in 1993.

Iranian prodigy Samira Makhmalbaf snagged the prestigious Jury Prize twice, first for her 2000 breakthrough feature “Blackboards” and again three years later for “At Five in the Afternoon”.

The last major prize winner was Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, who took home the Grand Prix for “The Wonders” in 2014. She’s back in the running this year with “Happy as Lazzaro”.

– Director’s cut, or not –

Women have made up barely 3.5 percent of the best director and best screenplay winners over the past seven decades.

Only four of the 111 winners have been female – and two of them were last year when Sofia Coppola became only the second woman to secure the best director trophy with her American Civil War drama “The Beguiled”.

Meanwhile, Briton Lynne Ramsay’s “A Beautiful Day” scored best screenplay

– Struggle to get in –

If only one woman has won the Palme d’Or it is also because very few of them ever get nominated.

Since 1946, only 84 of the 1,790 directors whose films has been shown in competition at Cannes have been women – in other words, less than one in 20.

The latest edition doesn’t buck the trend, with just three female directors among the 21 main competition contenders.

This is still better than the 2010 and 2012 festival editions, which featured all-male lineups.

While Cannes organisers acknowledge the gender inequality, they insist this merely reflects the underrepresentation of women directors in the cinema industry as a whole.

– Jury duty –

Australian actress Cate Blanchett heads this year’s starry majority-female jury, which also includes Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux.

While Blanchett is the 12th chairwoman in the festival’s 71-year history, only one woman director, Jane Campion in 2014, has had the honour.

She has said that Cannes needs to have an all-female jury one day to counter the decades of male domination.

Apart from the president, the jury is composed of four women and four men – a parity ratio observed since 2013.

Overall women fare slightly better as judges at Cannes, although it is still relative. One in five jury members have been women in its seven-decade history.