Month: March 2019

Over a single opening weekend, composer Pinar Toprak smashed all previous box-office records for women composers in film. She scored “Captain Marvel,” which made $153 million domestically. Until now, the top-grossing films by women composers were Rachel Portman’s “The Vow,” which made $125 million domestic in 2012, and Deborah Lurie’s “Dear John,” $80 million back

Italy-based The Open Reel has taken all international rights to Ricardo Calil’s “Cinema Morocco,” a documentary competition entry at the Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival (FICG), which March 8 -15. “Cinema Morocco” world premiered at the Dok Leipzig documentary and animation festival winning the Golden Dove Next Masters Award. The feature screened at Guadalajara on Sunday 10.

This weekend’s third-best U.S. screen average of the year for “Gloria Bell,” which he produced, or the Oscar last for “A Fantastic Woman,” both point in the same direction: Arguably, no producer in Latin American has been so successful in the last decade as Juan de Dios Larraín. The Ibero-American Mayahuel Larraín will now receive

When the Ramones first performed “Blitzkrieg Bop” at CBGB some 44 years ago, no one could have imagined the song would be heard in virtually every stadium and in multiple TV spots for mainstream products like Coppertone, GoPro, Peloton, AT&T and Taco Bell. And punk rock, the genre of music that the Ramones and so

Chile’s Parox, one of the country’s foremost TV companies (“Gen Mishima,” “Invisible Heroes”), is teaming with France’s Rouge Intl. to develop “Evasion” (Escape), the latest feature film from Cristian Jiménez, director of 2011’s Cannes-selected “Bonsai” and co-director of 2017 Sundance player “Family Life.” Parox founder-producer Sergio Gándara is attending Guadalajara Festival’s Co-production Meeting to seek

GUADALAJARA, Mexico —  This week, Mexico’s Guadalajara Festival will honor Chile as its guest country. That serves as  further recognition of an extraordinary 15 years after the so-called Newest Chilean Cinema broke out at 2005’s Valparaíso Festival with Matías Bize, Sebastián Lelio and Alicia Scherson bowing first features. During that stretch, Chile, just the seventh-largest

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Chile’s Storyboard Media has granted Variety exclusive access to the teaser for the upcoming Camilo Becerra and Sofía Gómez feature “Quizás es cierto lo que dicen de nosotras” (“Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us”). Storyboard heads Carlos Nuñez and Gabriela Sandoval are at the Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival (FICG), where

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Chile came into this year’s Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival (FICG) as the guest country of honor. Once here, Luis Alejandro Pérez García’s “Piola” stomped around the Guadalajara Construye Works in Progress section like it owned the place, snatching up six of a possible 13 prizes. After the success of Juan Caceres’ “Perro

“Booksmart” besties Molly and Amy pretty much aced high school: Valedictorian and student-body president Molly (Beanie Feldstein) got accepted to Yale, her top-choice university — and the first step in her goal of becoming the youngest Supreme Court justice — while study buddy and super-activist Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) plans to spend some time volunteering in

Lil Peep, the SoundCloud sensation turned genre-blending rap star, was exploring a film career before his death in 2017. At the SXSW premiere of the Terrence Malick-produced documentary “Everybody’s Everything,” about the rapper’s rise and untimely end, filmmakers told Variety that Peep was being pursued to take on his first movie role. Sebastian Jones, a

Arriving more than a half-century after Arthur Penn’s violent folk-ballad “Bonnie and Clyde” tapped into the zeitgeist and caught lightning in a bottle by portraying the Depression-era gangster couple in a manner that recast them as anti-establishment rebels, “The Highwaymen” aims to set the record straight with a respectfully celebratory depiction of the two lawmen

Casey Davies may be the least macho man you’ve ever met. When Casey Davies answers the phone, he is seldom surprised when the caller asks, “May I speak with Ms. Casey Davies?” Callers often assume that Casey Davies is a woman because Casey Davies is a woman’s name. When Casey Davies goes to work, his

The debate taking place in Hollywood about whether Netflix and other streamers should receive awards consideration for their films has made its way to Austin, Tex. for the South by Southwest festival. At the premiere of “The Highwaymen” on Sunday, stars Kevin Costner and Kathy Bates had some thoughts on the merits of theatrical releases

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — The 15th Guadalajara Festival co-production Meeting for feature film projects are taking place this week in the Jalisco capital, running March 8-14. The 2019 Meeting sees the biggest presence  in terms of gender diversity in the competition’s history. Among directors and producers participating this year, more than 45% are women. “That wasn’t an

“Who Let The Dogs Out,” the turn-of-the-millennium-era Grammy-winning Baha Men hit, has eclipsed kitsch to become a stadium anthem. And thanks to its peculiar origin story — the hook dates back to 1959 and the song’s ownership is a copyright maze — it’s now the subject of a documentary film, which held its world premiere

Marvel is coming for your indie darlings. Before Taika Waititi, Jon Watts and the Russo brothers were members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster club, they were all indie filmmakers. Thus far Marvel’s decision to collect creatives from smaller pictures has panned out, most recently with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Captain Marvel,” which opened

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association rallied a roster of film world heavy-hitters Saturday at the Ace Hotel’s United Artists theater in downtown Los Angeles for the organization’s first Film Restoration Summit devoted to celebrating classic films and the urgent need to put more resources into saving them. Naturally, the importance of preserving the big-screen experience