Month: January 2020

PBS’s documentary arm POV has snapped up U.S. broadcast rights for Kenyan director Sam Soko’s “Softie,” fresh off its world premiere in the World Documentary Cinema competition at Sundance, Variety has learned. The film, which is the first Kenyan-produced movie to premiere at the festival, will air as part of the series’ 33rd season, which kicks

January 26, 2020 9:48AM PT Three attention-seeking teens collide online and IRL in Danny Madden’s suburban tragedy that veers from naturalism to melodrama. Writer-director Danny Madden’s “Beast Beast” clatters to life with organic percussion: a stick rat-a-tatting against an iron fence, a skateboard scraping on concrete, a rifle pinging bullets against a defenseless tin plate.

British Film Commission chief executive Adrian Wootton argues that the fiscal incentives that make the U.K. such an attractive market for film and TV will not be affected by Brexit. He will deliver the following message to delegates at Sundance later today. With awards season in full swing, we are reminded of just how successful

The world is a weird place. Miranda July knows that, but the rest of us sometimes forget. Or maybe we just don’t want to admit how bizarre it is that society more or less agrees that back rubs and hot tubs and flavored chips and McRibs are an appropriate reward for a bazillion years of

GÖTEBORG, Sweden — Laughs were aplenty at the Stora Theatern, where Göteborg Film Festival artistic director Jonas Holmberg welcomed the recipient of the Nordic Honorary Dragon Award, fresh off his Golden Globe win for HBO’s “Chernobyl”. “It wasn’t planned. I thought that will be my only award this year, that’s why I said yes!” – joked Skarsgård,

Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s debut feature, “Promising Young Woman,” drew an exuberant response at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival Saturday night. The film, which will be released by Focus Features on April 17, is provocative — and will perhaps be divisive, particularly its ending. It’s a perfect talker for the #MeToo era. It’s best

Given that the entertainment industry is pretty much the center of the #MeToo universe in terms of generating its most public effects — and, needless to say, causes — probably no Sundance film this year will be as hot a conversation topic as “Promising Young Woman.” Emerald Fennell’s first directorial feature is a female revenge

Netflix dominated the 47th Annie Awards on Saturday, Jan. 25, picking up 19 trophies, including the top prizes of best feature (“Klaus”), best feature-independent (“I Lost My Body”), best TV/media production for preschool children (“Ask the Storybots”) and best general audience TV/media production (“BoJack Horseman”). Disney TV Animation’s “Disney Mickey Mouse” won best TV/media production

Addiction, you could say (and I would), has become the central demon that plagues Americans. We’re addicted to everything: alcohol, illegal drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, psychotropic drugs, sugar-bomb soft drinks, processed food, video screens…you name it. In theory, addiction was made for drama, because it rips into the fabric of people’s lives, and that’s intensely dramatic.

Greta Gerwig’s script for “Little Women” has won the USC Libraries Scripter Award for best movie adaptation and “Fleabag” has taken the television award. The winners were announced Saturday night at USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library. “Little Women” topped “Dark Waters,” “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Little Women” and “The Two Popes.” All but

Death isn’t wasted on the dead, exactly, but much that follows in its black-veiled wake is: A heartfelt eulogy, after all, is often composed of warm words we should have shared with the deceased before they turned cold. Eighties soft-rock band Mike and the Mechanics had a #1 hit with this very observation, of course:

With “Myth: A Frozen Tale,” Disney Animation has crafted a visually stunning virtual-reality short film — a project that flexes its VR muscles but deftly uses the technology in service of storytelling. Sometimes VR experiences feel like proof-of-concepts straining to justify their 3D settings. “Myth,” by contrast, employs virtual reality so effectively it feels like

“On the Record,” a devastating look at many of the women who came forward to accuse music mogul Russell Simmons of rape and harassment, premiered to not one, but two thunderous standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. The warm reception came as the film has become engulfed in a media firestorm, one

One of the people who’s made long-form television drama arguably more interesting as a whole than its mainstream big-screen equivalent in recent years, Alan Ball has underlined his superior comfort with that format in the few theatrical features he’s made to date. His screenplay for “American Beauty,” which Sam Mendes directed, was brilliant but glib;

The ceremony for the 72nd annual Directors Guild of America Awards is currently underway at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The DGAs are one of the most reliable bellwethers for the Academy Awards — all but seven directors who won the feature film award at the DGAs went on to win the corresponding

After two days of buzzy cameos out and about in Park City, Hillary Clinton finally took the main stage at the Sundance Film Festival. A four-part viewing of her new Hulu docu-series “Hillary” premiered Saturday at the Ray Theater, where the dedicated audience had but one intermission during the marathon screening, but was later rewarded