Month: January 2021

Issues of identity, assimilation and the contemporary Native American experience run deep beneath Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s feature debut, “Wild Indian,” while the surface narrative is one that any filmmaker could have told, albeit in a less original context. Watching “Wild Indian,” I was reminded of “Moonlight,” with its three distinct time periods. “Wild Indian”

“You get used to feeling mediocre,” says one of the merely very bright students in a school full of what he considers “geniuses.” “Try Harder,” Debbie Lum’s simultaneously charming and chastening documentary on the senior class in Lowell High — the majority Asian-American, top-ranked school in San Francisco — takes its cue from its lovable,

The cast and crew of “How It Ends” discussed the “apocalyptic comedy’s” connection to pandemic-era life and the worldwide appeal of the phenomenon that is Timothée Chalamet. Co-writers and directors Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones, along with star Cailee Spaeny, joined Sundance Film Festival’s Variety Studio presented by AT&T TV to discuss the makings of their

In a record-setting purchase, Apple Studios has emerged as the winner of “CODA,” the virtual Sundance sensation about a young hearing girl who grapples with breaking away from her deaf family. The Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht-led studio paid close to $25 million for the film, breaking last year’s recording setting “Palm Springs” sale

India will allow 100% occupancy in cinemas from Feb. 1, the country’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting announced on Saturday. Cinemas began reopening in October 2020 with 50% occupancy. “Seating arrangement inside the auditorium of the cinemas/theatres/multiplexes is to be allowed upto 100% seating capacity,” read a statement from the Ministry. Exhibition of films, however,

“In the Same Breath” isn’t shot like most documentaries. Towards the beginning of the film, director Nanfu Wang describes the process by which she chose her collaborators, explaining how she contacted camera operators on the ground in Wuhan to see if they would feel comfortable working on a film that exposes the COVID-19 misinformation campaign

For more than two decades, Gareth Jones had spent late January and early February in snowy Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. But on Thursday night, Jones didn’t have to get on a plane to attend the annual film festival. Instead, he drove to the Sidewalk Film Fest and Cinema in downtown Birmingham,

Mandy Patinkin and Lena Dunham have joined German filmmaker Julia von Heinz’s next film, “Iron Box,” about a New York businesswoman who decides to take her aging father back to his native Poland, where she hopes to explore her Jewish roots. In an interview with Variety during last year’s Venice Film Festival following the premiere

Best known for his gripping and visceral work on “High-Rise” and Netflix’s recent “Rebecca,” director Ben Wheatley’s latest Sundance offering “In The Earth” is a return to the bloody, brain-scrambling flicks he cut his teeth on. Wheatley joined his cast Ellora Torchia and Joel Fry at Variety’s Sundance Studio, presented by AT&T, to discuss his

Among the films in World Cinema Dramatic Competition at this year’s virtual Sundance is the darkly comic “El Planeta,” the debut feature of Spanish-Argentine artist Amalia Ulman, who has worked in video, sculpture and performance art. Ulman is best-known for her 2014 performance art piece “Excellences and Perfections” (more on that here), which was included

Particular Crowd, the fledgling U.S.-based film division from WarnerMedia’s Turner Latin America, has nabbed all Latin American rights to Argentine filmmaker Marcos Carnevale’s latest film, the dramedy “El Cuartito.” Shot and produced entirely in Puerto Rico, “El Cuartito” refers to the security screening room that five Latinos are confined in when they run afoul of

“On the Count of Three” is a trifle, but an original one: an existential buddy comedy of despair. It opens with Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) standing outside a strip club in the middle of the day, pointing handguns at each other in what looks like a tense Mexican standoff. But the two

Last year, Ben Wheatley released a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” in which his heroine suffers a trippy newlywed’s nightmare. She’s married to Armie Hammer, following him through the halls of Manderley, and the hallway carpet turns to crawling ivy, grabbing her ankles and pulling her down toward hell. This hallucination stands out in the

If you ever found yourself staring at an old childhood photograph, scrutinizing what your younger self was thinking in that moment, the idiosyncratically existential comedy “How It Ends” will leave a bittersweet aftertaste. Especially if you happen to catch this oddly sedative (if not tiresomely repetitive) Sundance 2021 premiere amid the loneliness of the ongoing

There’s an abandoned bunker in John’s backyard. Most kids would probably see it as a place to play, the basis for a hideout or secret fort. Some might climb in and get trapped, and then we’d hear all about it on the news. Not John. John goes through life in kind of a daze, a

After the arduous months we’ve had, who has the energy or brain space to sit through a more than two-hour-long heavy drama, especially when real-life is daunting enough as it is? Naturally, Variety has you covered with a list of the 35 best feel-good romantic comedies streaming now on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max