Month: September 2018

September 24, 2018 2:03AM PT Hannes Baumgartner makes a coldly auspicious debut with this fact-based study of a champion athlete turned serial assaulter of women. In an era of reckoning that is rapidly running out of new ways to describe the evil men do, “toxic masculinity” has become all too familiar a buzz term. But

September 24, 2018 1:57AM PT “Operation Red Sea,” the most successful film of the year at the mainland Chinese box office, has been selected by Hong Kong as its contender in the foreign-language Oscars category. The selection was made by the Federation of Motion Film Producers of Hong and announced on Monday. A violent propaganda

SAN SEBASTIAN — Spain’s San Sebastian Festival signed a pledge on gender parity Sunday, following in the footsteps of other major festivals in Europe such as Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo and Venice. San Sebastian Festival director José Luis Rebordinos made the commitment in the presence of Spanish deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo; the minister of culture

SAN SEBASTIAN — At a ceremony held on Saturday evening inside San Sebastian’s iconic Kursaal theater, American actor, director, producer and you-name-it Danny DeVito received the Donostia Award, given in recognition of his decades-long contributions to film, TV and the stage. Other recipients of the award this year are British actress Judy Dench and Japanese

SAN SEBASTIAN — Berlin-based M-appeal has secured additional sales deals for two titles, Toronto’s Netpac winner “The Third Wife”; Bafici’s best Argentine picture winner “The Daughters of Fire,” both screening at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Ash Mayfair’s debut feature, “The Third Wife” is the 19th century tale of May, a girl of just 14 years

When Hirokazu Kore-eda returned to the San Sebastian International Film Festival to accept his Donostia Award on September 23rd, it marked a fitting bit of symmetry for a story that began twenty years earlier. In 1998, Kore-eda arrived in San Sebastian a promising young upstart with his second feature, the bittersweet mortality drama “After Life,” playing in competition. A critical

In one scene in Natalia Meschaninova’s “Core of the World,” animal rights activists free some caged foxes from a hunting dog training farm in the forests of Russia. A few days later, two of the foxes reappear at the farm and climb back into their cages: They cannot fend for themselves in the wild. The

SAN SEBASTIAN — One of the biggest single public-sector funding systems in Europe, the European Union’s Creative Europe-Media Program, is up for renewal. On May 3o, the European Commission, the E.U.’s administrative arm, set out a proposal for renewed funding over 2021-27 of €1.85 billion. The Program’s head, Spain’s Lucía Recalde, used the San Sebastian

SAN SEBASTIAN — Gustavo Hernández and Ignacio Cucucovich’s Mother Superior, producer of Hernandez’s “La Casa Muda” and “You Shall Not Sleep,” has acquired Spanish-language remake rights to cult movie “Big Bad Wolves,” a film Quentin Tarantino described at Busan Festival in 2013 as best film of the year. The move is sure to make waves

SAN SEBASTIAN — As many people talk the talk, some companies are walking the walk – acquiring and selling women’s films as part of a growing business. In the latest move, announced Sunday at San Sebastian as the festival, the biggest in the Spanish-speaking world, signed a gender parity charter, Latido Films has acquired international

September 23, 2018 9:30PM PT Actor-director Jiang Wen concludes his decreasing-returns action trilogy with this good-looking but convoluted period romp. If the delicacy of the English title, “Hidden Man,” makes you think that Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen (last seen by Western audiences in “Rogue One”) might have come over uncharacteristically restrained for the final installment

For the most part, successful teen comedies follow a tried and true formula. Memorable high school movies typically feature characters who feel like outsiders floundering hilariously en route to the revelation that simply by being themselves, they’ll find what’s eluded them for so long. John Hughes knew it well, as did his imitators, realizing that

In case there are any young folks out there who aren’t convinced that the Nazis were bad — shockingly, there still seem to be stragglers — here stomps Julius Avery’s World War II thriller “Overlord,” a blast of righteous rage in which a group of good American boys avenge themselves against an SS goon squad

September 23, 2018 1:37PM PT Bruce Beresford’s feel-good dramedy about female department store workers in 1950s Sydney is a hit-and-miss affair. Women working at a fancy Sydney department store in 1959 are the subjects of “Ladies in Black,” an uneven dramedy directed and co-written by veteran Australian filmmaker Bruce Beresford (“Breaker Morant,” Driving Miss Daisy”).

Jeff Bridges is open to a “Big Lebowski” remake, but only under one condition — he has to be in it. Variety caught up with the actor Saturday night at the premiere of his latest film, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” where Bridges reflected on the 20th anniversary of the cult hit. The “Only

The films of Michael Moore have been faltering at the box office for several years now. This weekend, though, the lackluster performance of his latest truth-to-power opus, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” was notably dramatic, if not downright stark. The movie is a sequel, of sorts, to “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore’s scathing riff on the administration of George W.