Month: January 2022

First reactions for Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s “Scream” have arrived online, and it appears the fifth time is the charm for the long-running horror franchise. Film journalists are calling the new entry “a fittingly loud, bloody good time at the movies” and the best “Scream” movie since Wes Craven’s 1996 original. Franchise veterans Neve

In a potential windfall for New York’s film industry, Lionsgate Studios is now open for business. And when the $500 million Yonkers, N.Y., operation expands to a million square feet and 12 soundstages by mid-2023, it will become one of the largest production facilities in the East Coast. Great Point Studios (GPS), which is building

UPDATE: The European Film Market, which runs alongside the Berlin Film Festival, will be held online for the second consecutive year due to the pandemic. The festival, meanwhile, hopes to be maintained as an in-person event, Variety can reveal. Organizers have confirmed that the EFM has changed gears following a rise in COVID-19 cases in Germany.

BOOK “Irrfan: Dialogues with the Wind,” a book about the experiences of Geneva-based filmmaker Anup Singh who directed the late Indian actor Irrfan Khan in two acclaimed films — “Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost” (2013) and “The Song of Scorpions” (2017) — will be published by Copper Coin on Feb. 14. Khan, India’s

Fast-growing indie sales, distribution and production company Alief has acquired the global sales rights to writer-director Amanda Kramer’s “Give Me Pity!” which will world premiere at the upcoming International Film Festival Rotterdam on Jan. 29 in an honored position as the closing film of the event’s Filmmakers in Focus section. Following its world premiere, which

Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s “Assault” and “Kung Fu Zohra” from Mabrouk El Mechri are among the lineup at International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) 51st edition. The films were among 10 features selected for the Big Screen competition, which aims to bridge the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema. IFFR also boasts the Tiger Competition for emerging

As many as 85 films and a record 55 market premieres will screen at the Rendez-Vous in Paris, a week-long event organized by French promotion org Unifrance. The event will open on Monday with the world premiere of “Simone: A Journey of the Century,” a biopic of Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became health

Looks like 2022 is off to a promising start, courtesy of “See for Me,” a home-invasion drama in which the young woman tasked with defending said home — and, just as importantly, the cat who lives there — is blind. It’s rare that the first week of the year brings a notable performance, but Skyler

Global cinema box office reached $21.4 billion in 2021, according to calculations by researcher Gower Street Analytics. Powered by a “Spider-Man: No Way Home” surge in the last month, the annual total is a 78% gain on 2020. But last year’s cumulative was less than half of the $41.3 billion average of the three pre-pandemic

A biopic of iconic actress Audrey Hepburn starring Rooney Mara is in the works at Apple, Variety has confirmed. Oscar-nominated “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino will helm the project, with Mara producing and “The Giver” co-writer Michael Mitnick penning the script. Though plot details are being kept under wraps, Hepburn is an acting

A Frankensteinian mashup of sci-fi and torture-porn horror tropes, Danish “Breeder” is the kind of movie whose gloss of (eventual) empowerment lies awkwardly atop a story over-enthusiastically focused on women’s degradation and abuse. While there are vague pretensions toward seriousness in Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen’s screenplay and Jens Dahl’s direction, this thriller ends up discomfitingly most

Is anyone having a year like Andrew Garfield’s? Following a lengthy stage hiatus (which nabbed him a Tony Award), the actor stormed the fourth quarter of 2021 with back-to-back film releases in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!” The latter has placed him front and center for Oscar contention in the

Will 2022 be the year the film release calendar returns to semi-normalcy? No one knows yet, but while many movies premiered directly on streaming last year, there are dozens of big titles set for theatrical-only debuts, from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” to “Avatar 2.” Streaming offerings will also continue to represent strongly, with Netflix planning

With “Belle,” anime master Mamoru Hosoda has reimagined “Beauty and the Beast” for the metaverse set — that young generation of social media users who switch identities comfortably between the physical world and a more inviting online one. Roughly half the movie takes place in the “real world” (which is to say, a traditional cartoon

J.K. Simmons seemed destined to star in an Aaron Sorkin film and he finally does in Amazon Studios’ “Being the Ricardos.” But the two actually crossed paths years earlier. “My first Broadway play, I was an understudy replacement in ‘A Few Good Men,’” Simmons tells Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast. Simmons played the role of the

Costume designer Sharen Davis is having a big year, having worked with both Denzel Washington, who directed “A Journal for Jordan,” now in theaters, and with Will Smith, who stars in “King Richard,” on HBO Max. “A Journal for Jordan,” based on the heartbreaking true story of a soldier deployed to Iraq who keeps a

Peter Bogdanovich was born too late, but also at just the right time. The 82-year-old film critic, historian, advocate and maker, who died Thursday, first blinked his eyes in 1939, the year Alfred Hitchcock moved to Hollywood, Mr. Smith went to Washington and John Ford made “Stagecoach.” He’d surely love to have worked during the

Leonardo DiCaprio is one of Hollywood’s most outspoken environmentalists, and those efforts have now paid off in the form of a recently-discovered tree species being named after him. According to USA Today, Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, London honored DiCaprio this week by giving the Leo tree in Africa’s Cameroon forest the