The US says it is targeting all of Iran’s sources of revenue, including oil, as Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announces an ‘unprecedented’ economic war, warning of severe consequences for countries who continue to trade with Tehran.
Published On 24 Aug 2026
Paramount Pictures’ “The Heart of the Beast,” starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Ayer, has been added to San Sebastián Film Festival’s lineup, screening out of competition in its Official Selection.
Both Pitt and Ayer will attend San Sebastián to present the film, the Spanish film festival announced Monday.
The survival thriller sees Pitt, a former Army Special Forces soldier, who must find a way back to civilization after his small plane crashes deep in the Alaskan wilderness.
Aided by a retired service dog, Odin, who protects him from bears, wolves and other beasts, Pitt’s character must battle the elements and embark on a desperate attempt to stay alive, climb mountains and cross rivers.
Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe star with Pitt, who serves as a producer with Olivia Hamilton and Marty Bowen alongside Ayer.
“Heart of the Beast” was written by Cameron Alexander and executive produced by Alexander, Damien Chazelle, Scott Lumpkin, Chris Long, Pete Chiappetta, Anthony Tittanegro, Andrew Lary, Sophie Cassidy and Zack Conroy.
A Wild Chickens, Temple Hill, and Kino World production, the thriller was created in association with Domain Entertainment and Gulfstream Pictures.
Reuniting Pitt and Ayer after “Fury,” their 2014 World War II epic for Sony, “Heart of the Beast” marks the first announcement of big star presence at this year’s San Sebastián, which runs Sept. 18-26.
Another big name is likely to be Penelope Cruz, star of Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” who also makes an extended cameo as a cabaret singer rousing the troops in Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s “La bola negra.” Both films are selected for San Sebastián’s best-of-fests Perlak sidebar.
Vietnamese found-footage horror film “Lầu Chú Hoả: The Deadliest Mansion” is opening in North American theaters on Sept. 4, with Mockingbird Pictures placing the title across AMC, Regal and Cinemark circuits.
Directed by Hùng Trần, the film became Vietnam‘s first theatrical found-footage horror release and turned into a breakout hit after its June debut. It topped the local box office, drew more than one million admissions and crossed VND78 billion ($3 million) in cumulative grosses.
The story pulls from a well-known Vietnamese urban legend: a band of young streamers force their way into the notoriously haunted Hứa family estate, hoping the stunt will bring them fame and money. Instead their broadcast captures a dormant, malevolent force stirring back to life, pulling them into the century-old tale of the “Ghost of the Hứa Family.” The entire film was shot in found-footage style.
“Lầu Chú Hoả: The Deadliest Mansion” was produced by Runup Vietnam alongside South Korea’s Hive Media Corp, marking the Korean company’s first production investment outside its home market. Hive has backed several of Korea’s biggest recent releases, including “12.12: The Day,” “Inside Men,” “The Man Standing Next” and “Harbin,” along with the found-footage horror title “Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum,” which drew more than 2.6 million admissions in South Korea.
“Found footage has the power to make audiences feel as though they are experiencing the horror themselves,” said producer Lee Jin Sung. “Working with Hive Media Corp allowed us to bring that experience to a uniquely Vietnamese legend while preserving the identity and atmosphere that make the story distinctive.”
Mockingbird Pictures is overseeing the North American theatrical rollout as part of its broader effort to bring Vietnamese commercial films to international audiences.
“‘Lầu Chú Hoả: The Deadliest Mansion’ delivers one of the most intense Vietnamese horror experiences in recent years,” said Phong Duong, business director of Mockingbird Pictures and one of the executive producers at sister company Bluebells Studios. “We believe this is a film that can travel, and we want audiences around the world to experience that fear for themselves.”
Mockingbird Pictures’ distribution footprint spans more than 60 new theatrical releases a year in Vietnam and upwards of 100 titles across post-theatrical platforms, reflecting the company’s growing focus on bringing Southeast Asian films to international audiences.
Best Friend Forever has boarded international sales on Eugene Kotlyarenko’s “Vintage Violence,” starring Cole Sprouse (“Riverdale”) and Kiko Mizuhara, ahead of the film’s world premiere at Toronto’s Midnight Madness section.
WME is handling domestic rights on the thriller, which marks Kotlyarenko’s eighth feature. The filmmaker is known for weaving internet and online-video culture into contemporary stories, most notably with “Spree,” which premiered at Sundance in 2020 and later reached Netflix’s Top 10, and “The Code,” which played at Fantasia in 2024.
“Vintage Violence” also stars Nijiro Murakami (“Alice in Borderland”), Pierre Taki (“Like Father Like Son”) and Hio Miyazawa (“Egoist”). Mizuhara, who leads the cast with Sprouse, will also appear in Takashi Miike’s untitled Kyoto film.
The film follows a livestreamer who discovers a hidden cache of rare vintage denim in Colorado. After a subscriber lures him to Japan with the promise of a fortune for the jeans, he becomes embroiled in a dangerous turf war with the Yakuza.
The key crew includes Sean Price Williams, the topnotch cinematographer of “Good Time,” “The Sweet East” and “The Moment,” among others.
“‘Vintage Violence’ was made with lots of enthusiasm and cinephilia from everyone involved, so it’s great to work with Best Friend Forever, a company brimming with both those qualities,” said Kotlyarenko said. “Most importantly, we have the same goal in mind: for audiences all over the world to get rocked by this movie.”
The film reteams Kotlyarenko with producers Alex Hughes and Riccardo Maddalosso of Spacemaker Productions, which also backed ’s “Spree” and “The Code.” The company’s credits also include James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” and Sebastián Silva’s “Rotting in the Sun,” among others. Japan’s Barravento, whose credits include “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle,” and Mam Film, behind “Love Life,” are co-producing.
“We’re huge fans of Eugene’s cinema and the unique way he turns our hyper-connected moment into a playful, fresh cinematic language,” said Best Friend Forever co-founders Martin Gondre and Charles Bin. “‘Vintage Violence’ feels like an exciting new step – a funny, romantic and irreverent thriller, made with a freedom of style that recalls Takashi Miike,” they continued.
“Vintage Violence” joins Best Friend Forever’s fall 2026 slate, which also includes the Toronto titles “Half” and Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner “Elephants in the Fog.”
Bitcoin’s vocal advocate and founder of the world’s largest Bitcoin treasury firm, Strategy, has sparked fresh debate on Bitcoin amid the persisting buzz surrounding the asset’s recent breakout.
In a recent post shared by Saylor, the Bitcoin veteran shared a video that addresses the popular Bernard Arnault test, with claims that Bitcoin perfectly fits the criteria.
Saylor highlighted the Bernard Arnault test, describing it as how wealthy investors should make their investment decisions when in a dilemma about what asset to buy.
According to Saylor, Bitcoin passes the Bernard Arnault test, which was formed and named after the CEO of LVMH, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
While the test only categorizes assets that would still be considered desirable and in demand many years in the future for wealthy investors, Michael Saylor believes that Bitcoin fits into the category.
In essence, Saylor recommends Bitcoin for anyone who thinks they have a lot of money and wants to invest it, suggesting that it is a way to think like a billionaire.
Following his statement, Michael Saylor extended his longstanding position that investors should not only ask whether an asset can make them richer, but whether there will still be a strong market of buyers willing to acquire it from them years later.
This explains his relentless acquisition of the world’s largest crypto asset by market capitalization, regardless of whether the market is bullish or bearish.
The founder continues to recommend Bitcoin as a preferred asset for long-term investment, emphasizing its scarcity and price potential in years to come.
TAC, an EVM network connected to TON, halted validator block production after the project said an exploited vulnerability affected the Cosmos-based EVM side of its network and, according to TAC, only the TAC token supply.
In an Aug. 22 notice, the team said it was working with validators on a temporary halt that would take effect within minutes. TAC’s official Telegram announcement channel subsequently described the halt as implemented and promised further findings and steps toward resuming the chain.
A check of the TAC explorer API at about 1:03 p.m. UTC on Aug. 23 returned block 24,671,475, timestamped 11:58:11 p.m. UTC on Aug. 22, as the latest block. A fresh check of the TAC explorer at about 7:58 a.m. UTC on Aug. 24 still showed block 24,671,475.
TAC’s notices did not identify an unauthorized TAC amount, a dollar loss, the exploit transaction or block height, the vulnerable component, affected wallets, user losses or a restart timetable. The team also did not explain why the problem could not be isolated below the full-chain level.
The halt raises a state-reconciliation question that TAC has not yet answered. The project has not said whether native, wrapped, bridged, staked, exchange-held or protocol-controlled TAC balances must be checked before validators agree on a canonical state, and the available evidence does not establish that every one of those categories was affected.
The scope differs from TAC’s separate May 11 bridge breach. In its May 20 post-mortem, TAC said its sequencer software failed to verify both the code hash of a TON jetton, or token, wallet and the expected minter behind it. Counterfeit deposit messages were accepted, unbacked equivalents were issued on TAC, and genuine assets locked on TON were released through the normal return path.
TAC put the May incident’s total protocol loss at approximately $2,854,486.22 as of May 12 at 10 p.m. UTC. During that response, it halted the sequencer set connecting TAC to TON while saying the TAC EVM layer remained fully operational.
The latest validator-coordinated chain halt is therefore a broader operational response, but it does not establish a new loss figure or show that the two incidents share a root cause. Until TAC publishes technical details of the Aug. 22 supply incident and a reconciled supply figure, the defensible conclusion is limited: block production was stopped, TAC says the issue concerns only its token supply, and the conditions for resuming remain undisclosed.
Canada has suspended trade talks with the US after negotiations collapsed, with Trump imposing 50% tariffs on about $20bn of Canadian goods and Ottawa vowing dollar-for-dollar retaliation. Al Jazeera’s Urooba Jamal explains how a trade war could drive up prices and put jobs at risk.
Published On 24 Aug 2026
Nasdaq-listed Digital Currency X Technology Inc. is asking shareholders to approve a 160-for-1 reverse stock split, also known as a share consolidation, on September 3. It would be the company’s second consolidation of 2026 after a 12-for-1 action took effect on January 22.
Digital Currency X recently shifted from electric-vehicle manufacturing into the digital asset sector. In its latest annual report, the company said its treasury held 157.45 million EDGEAI tokens. It valued them at about $402 million as of December 31, 2025. It later locked all of those tokens in a 12-month staking agreement. The agreement carried a floating annualized yield of 3.5% to 8%.
For a holder whose balance is divisible by 160, every 160 Class A or Class B shares would become one share. A holder of 16,000 shares, for example, would receive 100. The filing says the company would round fractional results up to the nearest whole share, so smaller or nondivisible positions would not follow that arithmetic exactly. The consolidation would cover both issued and unissued shares. It would take effect on a date confirmed by Nasdaq or one on which the exchange raises no objection.
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The first resolution would reduce authorized shares from 3 billion, each with a par value of $0.0001, to 18.75 million, each with a $0.016 par value. A second resolution would immediately increase the authorization back to 3 billion shares at the higher par value. A third would reorganize the authorized share capital back to $0.0001 per share. Shareholders had approved the 3 billion-share authorization on May 13, according to a May filing.
Authorized shares are capacity, rather than stock already issued. The resolutions would not themselves issue shares or prove immediate dilution, but they would leave the company able to issue far more shares after the consolidation than the 18.75 million-share ceiling created by the first step alone.
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The disclosed issued-share figures come from two earlier dates and establish only a floor. Digital Currency X’s annual report listed 19,823,627 Class A shares and 1,334 Class B shares outstanding as of April 20. A July 7 filing then said the company issued 331,753,557 units, each including one Class A share and warrants, at a July 3 private-placement closing. Together, those disclosures establish at least 351,577,184 Class A shares plus 1,334 Class B shares before any later warrant exercise or other issuance.
Class A shares carry one vote each on general-meeting matters, while Class B shares carry 20. On the April counts, the Class B class represented 26,680 votes against more than 19.8 million Class A votes. The July issuance added Class A shares, but the materials do not establish current holder-by-holder control for the September vote.
The company said it intended January’s consolidation to help regain Nasdaq minimum bid-price compliance. By contrast, the August meeting notice does not identify a compliance, financing, or offering rationale for the proposed 160-for-1 reverse stock split and capital reorganization. Intervening issuance also changed the share base, so the two ratios do not describe one continuous holder-level reduction.
The Zoom-only meeting is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. Hong Kong time on September 3. Internet and phone voting closes at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on September 2, while proxy forms have a separate deadline no later than 48 hours before the meeting.
The Venice Film Festival has added Naza, a politically-charged documentary from No Other Land filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to its competition line-up for this year.
The documentary claims to reveal in detail “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. Naza was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson at JW Films in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand. Wilson produced Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. Glazer is an executive producer on Naza. According to the producers, the film’s title “comes from a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.”
The doc will have its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 10. It is the only feature documentary picked for competition this year.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are two of the four co-directors of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that chronicled violent evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict took center stage at the Venice Film festival last year, with the world premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, a ticking-clock docudrama from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania about about efforts to save a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli forces in Gaza. [The Israeli military investigation last week announced an official investigation into Hind Rajab’s death, a move Ben Hania has dismissed as “a smokescreen.”].
The Venice audience embraced the film, giving it a festival-best 22-minute standing ovation. The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Silver Lion Grand Jury award, the runner-up prize, losing out to best film Golden Lion winner Father Mother Sister Brother from Jim Jarmusch.
Ahead of the 2025 festival, thousands had marched on the Lido to protest Israeli military action in Gaza, and a group of international filmmakers and artists had pressed Barbera to take a “clear and unambiguous stand” by condemning the war as a “genocide.” He didn’t, though he expressed his “huge sadness and suffering vis-à-vis what is happening in Gaza and Palestine.”
While Naza will be the only documentary on the conflict in competition, there are several other Venice-bound docs on the crisis in the region. Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama profiles a photojournalist navigating survival and fatherhood in besieged Gaza. Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea follows a Palestinian man caught up in Israeli bureaucracy. And Road to Jericho, a documentary from Israeli director Amos Gitai, tracks the fate of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin hamlet outside Jerusalem on the verge of being erased by the Israeli state.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs Sept. 2-12.
Brad Pitt and director David Ayer will hit this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival with their latest film, Heart of the Beast.
From Paramount Pictures, the movie will screen out of competition at the Spanish festival. Both Pitt and Ayer are expected to attend the event, as the Oscar-winning star plays a former Special Forces officer who, accompanied by his retired combat dog, must survive in the Alaskan wilderness following a harrowing plane crash.
It marks Pitt’s first visit to the festival since his 2009 presentation of Inglourious Basterds, alongside filmmaker Quentin Tarantino.
Ayer’s credits include Training Day, Suicide Squad, End of Watch, The Tax Collector and Sabotage. His latest feature is written by Cameron Alexander and reunites him with Pitt (who starred in Ayer’s Fury). The film’s cast also includes J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe. Pitt produces the film alongside Olivia Hamilton, Marty Bowen and David Ayer, with Damien Chazelle among its executive producers.
With the addition of Heart of the Beast, the list of titles in San Sebastian’s official selection is now complete. The 74th edition includes 17 films in competition, three out of competition and five special screenings.
This year’s batch boasts opening film Ghost Song from Faith Akin, closer Le Faux Soir from Michaël R. Roskam, as well as a slew of other projects from Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Pablo Larrain (My Sad Dead) and Jaime Lorente (The Bad Son). Other competition highlights include Milo from director Nicole Garcia (Oran), a French drama featuring Marion Cotillard and Lurker star Théodore Pellerin; and In My Father’s Room, the directorial debut of Japanese novelist Maha Harada.
Prolific German filmmaker Werner Herzog is receiving the fest’s Donostia Award.