Movies

When I think of actress Lupe Ontiveros, who passed away from liver cancer at 69 Thursday night, what stays with me most is her strength. Her women tended to be strong and resilient, no-nonsense types, whether they were running a theater company as she did in "Chuck & Buck," dealing with a rebellious daughter in "Real Women Have Curves," or picking up after some well-heeled white family, as she did in"The Goonies. "There was a "I have seen it all" quality that danced in her eyes, more bemused by the frailties of the human race than bitter about them.

Cinemark Holdings Inc., the nation's third-largest theater chain, is bulking up in Los Angeles County with plans to open a multiplex at the SouthBay Pavilion shopping mall in Carson. Vintage Real Estate, which owns and manages SouthBay Pavilion, said it had recently signed a lease with Cinemark to bring a 14-screen theater to the mall. Set to open in December 2014, the multiplex will be among the highest-profile locations for Cinemark in the Los Angeles region. PHOTOS: Celebrities by The Times The Plano, Texas, circuit, which has 5,259 movie screens in the U.S. and Latin America, already has a dozen cinemas in the Los Angeles area and is expanding its footprint in Southern California.

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's not a complete list, but it is eclectic, like the city itself. Mystic Hotel. This property, which opened in April, stands on a tunnel-adjacent block of Stockton Street that you'll never see on a picture postcard, yet it has style, as do the Burritt Tavern bar and restaurant downstairs.

Wendy Greuel's resume is dotted with the political accomplishments of a politician on the rise. But there was an unconventional detour: her stint as an executive at DreamWorks SKG, working alongside Hollywood titans Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Greuel cites the job as evidence that she understands the city's most prominent industry. Her position at DreamWorks, however, was about more than making movies - she was a go-between for the studio to the political, governmental and civic worlds.

You can do a lot with smartphones these days, but unless you're downloading the best apps for your device, you aren't really using it to its full potential. So if you aren't sure what to download, just make sure you have these 10 apps on your iPhone or Android device. Google Maps This app comes preinstalled on Android devices and should be the first app downloaded on iPhones. Besides top-notch design, the app is the best free voice navigation app for driving directions.

Emma Watson will strip down to raise environmental awareness, even though she won't do it for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" star tweeted her support for James Houston's book of celebrities posing nude to raise environmental awareness. The book's proceeds will go to Global Green USA, a nonprofit focused on sustainability. PHOTOS: Hermione Granger through the years "My friend is supporting GlobalGreenUSA with his book Natural Beauty.

Crews of hundreds can typically spend years making a single animated feature — and it's not uncommon during what "Kung Fu Panda 2" director Jennifer Yuh Nelson describes as a "messy, creative process" for a director to be fired midway through a production. It happened to Jan Pinkava, who was directing 2007's "Ratatouille" before Brad Bird took over the Oscar-winning Pixar film. And it happened to Chris Sanders ("How to Train Your Dragon"), who was removed from Disney's "American Dog" in 2006, before it was reimagined as "Bolt.

Maria Belón wasn't proud of her dumb luck. It had been nearly three years since the Indian Ocean tsunami roared into her family's Christmas vacation in Thailand, killing 230,000 people but somehow sparing her, her husband and her three sons. The family had since returned to Madrid, resumed their routines, but she carried on her shoulders the pain and suffering of surviving something that took so many others' lives. Lost in a quiet grief, unable to enjoy simple pleasures, she wasn't eager to share her story.

Just weeks before the national political conventions get underway, a crucial figure has yet to commit to the presidential race. Jason Sudeikis, who plays "Saturday Night Live's" Mitt Romney as a cheerfully button-down, out-of-touch, Ward Cleaver-like figure, said he has not yet decided whether to return to the sketch show when it resumes this fall. After nine years at "SNL" - the last few as the show's most valuable straight man - Sudeikis has been spending recent months focusing on his movie career.

Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Paramount Pictures on a promotional effort for the studio's "Star Trek Into Darkness. " It represents the biggest such undertaking ever for the software giant. The Redmond, Wash., company's campaign isn't short on whimsy: Bing, Microsoft's Internet search engine, was updated Tuesday to include the "Star Trek" language Klingon in its online translation service. But there also is strategic significance to the marketing venture, because it leverages so many Microsoft services, devices and platforms in a way not previously attempted by the company for a movie promotion.

Who would have thought the son of Biff from the 1985 movie classic, "Back to the Future," might become a high school pitching star? Tommy Wilson, a junior pitcher at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame and the son of actor Thomas F. Wilson, came through for the Knights in their Southern Section Division 1 wild-card playoff game Tuesday, throwing five shutout innings while striking out eight in a 6-1 victory over Riverside North. Notre Dame (16-11), one of two Mission League teams to win wild-card games, will face Marmonte League champion Agoura on Thursday at Agoura in the first round.

Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Paramount Pictures on a promotional effort for the studio's "Star Trek Into Darkness. " It represents the biggest such undertaking ever for the software giant. The Redmond, Wash., company's campaign isn't short on whimsy: Bing, Microsoft's Internet search engine, was updated Tuesday to include the "Star Trek" language Klingon in its online translation service. But there also is strategic significance to the marketing venture, because it leverages so many Microsoft services, devices and platforms in a way not previously attempted by the company for a movie promotion.

A loud screeching sound echoed across the oval racetrack as a driver burned rubber, revving the engine of a silver Mercedes-Benz and spinning the vehicle a full 360 degrees while kicking up a cloud of dust and smoke. This wasn't a stock car race, but a shoot for an upcoming Mercedes commercial that was being filmed at Irwindale Speedway, where about two dozen crew members huddled Monday morning under blue pop-up tents next to camera stands and film equipment to escape the suffocating 104-degree heat.

MOSCOW - Russian authorities detained an American diplomat accused of attempting to recruit a Russian intelligence officer into the CIA, the Federal Security Service said Tuesday. Ryan Christopher Fogle, the third secretary of the American Embassy in Moscow, was held overnight before being handed over to U.S. authorities Tuesday, according to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB. Fogle, who was ordered to leave the country, was carrying a large amount of money and written instructions for the Russian recruit, the FSB said.

What's to live for? The price of wine continues to skyrocket, and Warren Buffett is now tweeting. What's next for us culturally? Bingo night at the Louvre? Meanwhile, the criminal justice system insists on hammering on poor Lindsay Lohan. It's only a matter of time before her work suffers, and then who takes over as the freckled queen of American cinema? Leonardo DiCaprio? That's the obvious answer. Yes, I have issues with him as Gatsby, but more on that in a moment. For now, I'll tell you what's to live for. Summer, that's what.

Deanna Durbin, the singing starlet with the bubbly personality and the jewel-tone voice whose enormously popular movies were widely credited with saving Universal Pictures from bankruptcy during the Depression, has died. She was 91. Her popularity peaked by her late teens and by her mid-20s Durbin had left Hollywood forever, made wealthy by her relatively brief career. She died in April in France, said family friend Bob Koster, the son of Henry Koster, who directed Durbin in films early in her career.

With "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown's news Tuesday morning that he would be releasing a new Robert Langdon adventure in May, we thought it wise to check in with the movie prospects for Brown's last Langdon tale, "The Lost Symbol," which resided on the New York Times hard-cover fiction bestseller list for 29 weeks and has 30 million copies in print worldwide. Sony's Columbia Pictures, which released the previous two films, "The DaVinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," owns the option to all of Brown's future projects involving Langdon, including "The Lost Symbol" and the upcoming "Inferno.

Visitors to next week's Toronto International Film Festival can take a break by visiting the city's fantastic Hockey Hall of Fame. But there should be no shortage of elbowing, body checks and brawling in the festival's theaters, where an unusually large number of high-profile movies will be fighting for distribution deals. The Cannes and Sundance cinematic gatherings may attract more media attention as sales markets, but Toronto delivers a steady stream of significant deals for films financed outside the studio system; in the last few years Toronto has yielded distribution pacts for "The Hurt Locker," "The Wrestler" and "The Visitor.

Mike Gray, an author, activist and documentarian who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "The China Syndrome," the provocative 1979 film about a cover-up at a nuclear power plant, died Tuesday of heart failure at his Hollywood Hills home, his family said. He was 77. Gray developed the "China Syndrome" story after reading books and interviewing scientists about the dangers of nuclear power. No one knew how timely the subject would prove. A nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into partial meltdown barely three weeks after the opening of the movie, which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and became a box-office and critical success.

Hollywood North is going south. That's the fear among many in the once-booming production community in Vancouver, Canada. Although Vancouver still attracts high-profile movies and television shows, including A&E's recently launched "Bates Motel," the city is rapidly losing its perch as one of the industry's busiest production hubs as it faces rising competition from cities in eastern Canada and south of the border. The city that pioneered the use of film incentives now finds itself struggling to compete with emerging rivals offering stronger tax credits and rebates.