Month: February 2022

NBC Sports says 16 million viewers tuned in to watch the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, an all-time low for Olympic ceremonies on linear television. That’s around 43% down compared to the 28.3 million viewers that watched the PyeongChang Winter Olympics opening ceremony in February 2018. Friday’s torch-lighting in Beijing aired live
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The Spanish Film Academy announced on Friday that its first-ever International Goya Award will be received by Cate Blanchett. Currently presided by Mariano Barroso, the Spanish Film Academy created the award to “honor artists that have contributed to cinema as a medium that brings together different cultures and people.” In Friday’s announcement, Blanchett was recognized
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Danish debut feature helmer-writer Tea Lindeburg’s period drama “As In Heaven,” that portrays a fateful summer day and night in 19th century farming society, came away the biggest winner at the 44th Göteborg Film Festival, scoring on Saturday the best Nordic film kudo, this year worth approx. $44,000. Meanwhile, Seidi Haarla of Finland’s Oscar-shortlisted drama, “Compartment
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With its Joe Rogan deal in a white-hot spotlight, Spotify has pulled an additional 70 episodes of the popular podcaster’s show from the platform. The 70 episodes removed Friday were originally recorded between 2009 and 2018 — before the COVID-19 pandemic. A controversy over coronavirus misinformation on Rogan’s podcast has boiled over in the last
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After a quiet January that saw one horror sequel and the same holiday releases putter out over several weeks, the domestic box office finally has a new leader. Paramount Pictures’ “Jackass Forever” is projected to earn $20.7 million in its opening, stunting on the weekend’s other wide release, “Moonfall.” “Jackass Forever” earned $9.6 million on
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As Russia-Ukraine tensions rise, dominating international headlines, director Maria Ignatenko talks about the hell of war in her Rotterdam Film Festival title “Achrome.” But her oneiric film, lensed by Anton Gromov, is not exactly a comment on the current situation in Europe. “This particular topic is becoming more and more timely these days, but my
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In a new series, Variety catches up with the directors of the films shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar to discuss their road to the awards, what they’ve learned so far, and what’s taken them off guard. Paolo Sorrentino, who won an international Oscar for “The Great Beauty” in 2014, is back in contention with
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Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom – whose films include Luca Guadagnino’s Oscar nominee for best picture “Call Me by Your Name” and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” and who recently lensed Netflix thriller “Beckett” – received the third Robby Müller Award on Thursday, following in the footsteps of
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Hauntingly beautiful and deeply enigmatic, “Neptune Frost” has enjoyed perhaps the most coveted festival run of 2021. Blending science fiction, dance and allegorical elements, the striking Afrofuturist feature debuted at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It has since been invited to screen at some of the top showcases: Toronto, New York, London, Sundance, Rotterdam and
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TikTok, the omnipresent video-based social-media app that launched five years ago, has always seemed a less serious, more frivolously youthquakey destination than a number of other online networking services — most obviously Facebook. Yet as Shalini Kantayya’s sprightly, informative documentary “TikTok, Boom.” makes clear, there are more levels to the TikTok phenomenon than there are
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Family photos, propaganda images and grainy archival footage are manipulated, re-processed and overlaid with wonderfully simple and highly effective animation in “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish.” This imaginative documentary essay by 36-year-old U.S.-based Chinese artist-animator-filmmaker Lei Lei assembles striking imagery and deeply personal audio recordings to chart his family’s history in China from the late
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The 2022 Slamdance Film Festival has announced the winners of their annual Sparky Awards. The film festival focused on the works of emerging artists began its 28th edition on Jan. 27, hosting 23 premieres of films chosen from over 8,000 submissions. The awards were announced at a virtual awards ceremony on Friday, with the winning
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CBS has given out a pilot order to a drama about convicts that fight wildfires in California. Titled “Cal Fire,” the potential series focuses on young convict Bode Donovan. Seeking redemption and a shortened sentence, he joins a firefighting program that returns him to his small Northern California hometown, where he and other inmates work
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Spoiler alert: This piece contains spoilers for Part 1 of Season 4 of “Ozark,” currently streaming on Netflix. As “Ozark” barrels toward its bloody conclusion, the drama series introduced a new and terrifying antagonist for Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney), the money-laundering couple at the center of the show’s criminality and
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NBC has placed drama pilot orders for “The Brave” creator Dean Georgaris’ “Blank Slate” and an adaptation of the novel “Predictably Irrational.” Written by Georgaris, “Blank Slate” follows Special Agent Alexander McCoy, a legend in law enforcement, the agent we all hope is out there, the agent we’d all like to be, per the project’s
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Uggs never went really went away for some of us—even if we didn’t exactly advertise we still wore them. Now, as Y2K fashion continues its extended takeover, a growing fashion chorus is admitting Ugg boots are back with a shearling-lined vengeance. Present-day Ugg wearers aren’t hesitating to take their comfort shoes public, the “ultra mini”
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How big of a liability vs. an asset will Joe Rogan prove to be for Spotify? A new survey sheds some light on which way the wind might blow given the spate of #DeleteSpotify and #CancelSpotify hashtags that blew up on social media in recent days — although similar past customer backlashes have resulted in
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