Month: February 2021

Danish helmer Janus Metz’s next feature project after Amazon Studios’ “All the Old Knives,” starring Laurence Fischburne and Chris Pine, will be the Danish drama “Bastard Love,” produced by Jesper Morthorst (“Silent Heart,” “Rita”) and Lise Orheim Stender (“Heartstone,” “Venus Effect”) for Motor. “Bastard Love” will be Metz’s sophomore Scandinavian feature film after the multi-awarded

Robert C. Jones, the acclaimed film editor behind 1960s and ’70s classics “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Love Story” who garnered a screenplay Academy Award for the war drama “Coming Home,” has died. He was 84. His daughter, Leslie Jones — who is also an Oscar-nominated film editor — confirmed to Variety that Jones died

Not quite adult enough to be young adult, and not quite a children’s film either, Kate Tsang’s “Marvelous and the Black Hole” is a sweet-natured throwback, the kind of film a parent might wish their young teen would watch, rather than whichever dystopian franchise or fanfic adaptation they’re currently involved with. A set-your-watch-by-it riff on

Roberto Olla, executive director of Eurimages, has revealed that the Strasbourg-based public funder has hired diversity consultants to help facilitate fairer funding for under-represented filmmakers. Speaking at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week on a panel titled “Reality Check: Funding Our Inclusive Futures,” Olla said that the co-production funding body, which comprises 41 member

The sunbaked, drought-stricken terrain of southeast India is a major determinant of the action in P S Vinothraj’s beautifully crafted, precisely plotted debut, “Pebbles.” Taking a simple premise with all the focus and penetration of a perfectly constructed short story, the writer-director transforms the drama of a young boy dragged between villages by his abusive

NENT Group’s Swedish label Brain Academy is plotting two major films from A-list writing-directing teams. The first, “The World Council of Magic,” is helmed by “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”’s Kristian Petri, based on a screenplay by genre-bending author John Ajvide Lindqvist(”Border,” “Let the Right One In”). ”The World Council of Magic” is

Accepting the Robby Muller award online this week, ahead of a talk at the International Film Festival Rotterdam to celebrate her work, Kelly Reichardt appeared delighted with its form. In its second year, the award has taken the guise of an enlarged Polaroid print featuring a solitary tree, which was taken by Muller on a

As The Netherlands, under lockdown, celebrated the first half of 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam’s online, the physical half – set to take place in June with real audiences, panels and talks without Zoom links attached – still feels like a long way off. Meanwhile, the industry is hopeful that the swift and pragmatic measures

“Mayday,” which took its first European bow at the Rotterdam Film Festival this week after premiering at Sundance, is the debut feature of U.S. writer/director Karen Cinorre. The film tells the tale of oppressed young waitress Ana (Grace Van Patten, “The Meyerowitz Stories”) working at a wedding, who falls through an oven into a female-dominated

After a world premiere in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival, Swedish director Frida Kempff will present her suspenseful feature debut “Knocking” to domestic audiences as the closing night of the virtual Göteborg Festival. Variety caught up with her in the run-up to her Göteborg bow: How was the virtual presentation of the

The explanatory text that opens “The Wanting Mare,” Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s ambitious, epoch-spanning directing debut, informs us that in the city of Whithren, citizens are desperate to escape by booking passage on the once-a-year transport ship that carries wild horses to the wintry promised land of Levithen. These words, a fantasist’s delight, only barely set

“We’re dealing with slavery and slave content. How are we approaching this material and what’s the unique way of doing that?” “Augustus” filmmaker Jon Alston asked when making his documentary short feature which is gaining awards chatter and hoping to make the shortlist. Alston’s short tracks a slave’s fight as he stands up for his

It’s some kind of paradox — he probably thought of it as a joke played on him by the gods — that Christopher Plummer, the impishly irascible, velvet-voiced star of stage and screen who died Friday at 91, was one of the great Shakespearean actors of the 20th century, as well as a notorious rapscallion

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an internet rumor run amok! Despite multiple online reports suggesting otherwise, Henry Cavill will not appear as Superman in the upcoming DC Films project “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” two sources with direct knowledge of the production and Cavill’s schedule confirmed to Variety. It’s easy to understand why

When director Constantine Venetopoulos was working on psychological drama “The Man in the Attic” with Jennifer Lopez’s sister, Leslie Lopez, starring as an opera singer, a room in Leslie’s house filled with drawings caught his attention. That was when he met Jennifer Lopez’s nibling (a non-gendered term used in place of niece or nephew) Brendon Scholl

Armie Hammer has been dropped by WME, Variety has learned. According to a knowledgable source, Hammer’s personal publicist is also stepping away. WME parted ways with the actor following continuous allegations against the actor that have surfaced on social media over the past month. In messages blasted across social media, which Hammer has not verified,