Month: January 2022

The Recording Academy has donated $150,000 and struck a partnership with GLAAD — the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) media advocacy organization — to support its work to diversify the music industry and champion musicians in the LGBTQ+ community, the organization announced Tuesday. According to the announcement, the initiatives include: Editorial
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Gaumont, the venerable French film and television group behind “The Intouchables” and “Lupin,” is launching in Italy with Marco Rosi, an industry veteran joining from Lux Vide, and a bullish first slate. The company is already well-established in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. Its expansion in Italy represents a logical step in Gaumont’s global
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Chinese video streaming firm iQiyi has teamed with Canada’s Wildbrain to jointly produce kids’ animation series “Jonny Jetboy.” The series was hatched by Keith Chapman, creator of “PAW Patrol” and “Bob The Builder” and will run to an initial forty 11-minute episodes. The story follows Jonny Jones, the youngest member of a family of heroes
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With a number of remakes and a movie in the pipeline, “Call My Agent!,” the International Emmy Award-winning series set at a Parisian talent agency, has become one of the most powerful television shows to emerge from France. The series’ producers, Mediawan-owned Mon Voisin Productions and Mother Production, are co-producing the highly anticipated U.K. remake
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Top Australian actor Damon Herriman and U.K.-Italian star Greta Scacchi join “Succession” star Sarah Snook in horror-thriller “Run Rabbit Run” from “The Handmaid’s Tale” director Daina Reid. The film starts production in Victoria and South Australia this week. Snook replaced Elizabeth Moss who was previously attached, but who dropped out late last year due to
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The trailer for Francesco Costabile’s Mafia family drama “Una Femmina,” which premieres in Berlinale’s Panorama section, has debuted. Intramovies will handle sales at the virtual European Film Market. [embedded content] The film centers on Rosa, a restless young woman who lives with her mother’s relatives in a remote village in Calabria, Southern Italy. Her mother’s
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What happens when a cutting-edge artist no longer considers himself cutting edge? That’s one question raised by “Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People,” but it’s far from the only one. In addition to being a stop-motion animated documentary about Brazilian cartoonist Angeli, it’s also a psychedelic road movie in which a roving pack of
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Neil Young has shared a message demanding his music be removed from Spotify, citing the streaming service’s distribution partnership with Joe Rogan and accusing Rogan’s podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” of spreading false information regarding COVID-19 and vaccines. The musician posted an open letter to his official website on Monday evening, although it has since
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“What would you do if you had six months left to live?” asks the doctor who diagnoses a do-nothing bureaucrat with terminal cancer in “Ikiru,” a 1952 masterpiece I suspect precious few of those who see its English-language remake, “Living,” will recall. Quite unlike anything else in Akira Kurosawa’s career, “Ikiru” ranks among the Japanese
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Netflix’s “Robin Robin” uses stop-motion animation and felt figures to tell its charming, musical story of a bird who doesn’t quite belong in a family of stealthy mice and discovers her real place in the world. It’s a Christmas tale that’s also made the Oscar shortlist for animated shorts. Directors-writers Dan Ojari and Mikey Please
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If the Jane Collective has gone under-credited in American women’s rights history over the last half-century, independent cinema is doing its best to make up for lost time. Right on the heels of Phyllis Nagy’s colorful fictionalized drama “Call Jane,” “The Janes” is the second film at this year’s Sundance festival dedicated to the female-staffed,
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An assembly line follows a simple formula. Use the most efficient way to mass-produce something and repeat. Some filmmakers can get away with that approach for a time. The ones who challenge themselves to work outside their comfort zones add skills to their tool kits, and, not coincidentally, often find themselves in the mix when
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A scrapbook collection of serene, observational moments in search of a story, “Blood” runs deep, but only with obscure meaning, so opaque at times that its essence feels unreachable. Writer-director Bradley Rust Gray’s first feature in a decade offers some modest rewards to patient viewers up for a challenge, but this good-natured study of a
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Longtime film distribution executive Melvin “Duffy” Stanley Maron died Jan. 13 in Atlanta. He was 90. Maron brought martial arts and cult movies to theater, drive-in and TV audiences throughout the 1970s including Edie Sedgwick starring “Ciao Manhattan,” “Godzilla’s Revenge,” the double bill of “War of the Gargantuas” and “Monster Zero” and “The Cult,” about
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This year at the Sundance Film Festival, three feature documentaries — Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” and Isabel Castro’s “Mija” — share in common a $10,000 grant provided by the Points North Institute and CNN Films’ American Stories Documentary Fund. Launched in 2020, the fund underwritten
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Barbara Gordon has officially found her roommate. Ivory Aquino (“Tales of the City,” “When We Rise”) has been cast in the HBO Max feature film “Batgirl” as Alysia Yeoh, the best friend of the titular superhero, a.k.a. Barbara Gordon (Leslie Grace). Both Aquino and Yeoh are transgender, marking the first time a live-action feature film
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Alyssa Milano is attached to executive produce a series adaptation of Dr. Connie Mariano’s memoir “The White House Doctor” that is in development at Fox, Variety has learned. Per the show’s logline, the White House doctor is known as the “Shadow of the President.” Whether in the ER-like Medical Unit in the White House itself or traveling
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Reigning “Jeopardy” champion Amy Schneider is coming for Ken Jennings’ hall-of-fame spot. She may have a long way to go, but on Monday, Schneider claimed her 39th victory, making her the contestant with the second-most consecutive wins in the game show’s history. Only Jennings, who newly took over hosting duties from the late Alex Trebek,
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“Ghosts” has been renewed for Season 2 at CBS, with the broadcaster also announcing a Season 5 renewal for “The Neighborhood” and a Season 4 renewal for “Bob Hearts Abishola.” CBS had previously announced a three-year renewal for “Big Bang Theory” prequel “Young Sheldon.”  “Ghosts” has proven to be a success for CBS in its
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