Month: January 2023

Jurors for Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition walked out of the premiere of “Magazine Dreams” on Friday night over an incident in which the festival failed to provide adequate captioning for deaf and hearing impaired audience members — including juror Marlee Matlin. Members of the dramatic jury — consisting of Jeremy O. Harris, Eliza Hittman and

If there’s one performance that everyone is buzzing about at Sundance, it’s Jonathan Majors in “Magazine Dreams.” The actor stunned Park City with his transformative performance as a toxic bodybuilding fanatic. Majors appears as a hulking beast in the film, with the camera often lingering on his muscles for minutes on end. The actor revealed

Readying Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” and Christopher Murray’s “Sorcery” for world premieres at this year’s Sundance Festival, “Spencer” director and producer Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s Fabula has promoted Constanza Muñoz to VP of film at its North American office. The move comes as Fabula continues to expand into the English-language market. Muñoz

In Sophie Barthes’ third feature, sci-fi satire “The Pod Generation,” which plays in the Premieres strand at the Sundance Film Festival, the French-born director explores A.I., commodification, motherhood and our relationship to both technology and nature, as well as critiquing progress, consumerism and our way of life. “The Pod Generation,” which Barthes also wrote and

Stories about the gay heyday of 1970s San Francisco — and the cruel chaser of the AIDS crisis the following decade — often hang on the notion of chosen family within the queer community: the bonds formed when blood ties are severed by prejudice. Studies of biological family, and parenthood especially, in that context are

Michael J. Fox nearly broke the internet last October when he reunited with “Back to the Future” co-star Christopher Lloyd on stage at New York Comic Con. The duo were on the verge of tears as Fox emotionally hugged Lloyd and Lloyd putt his arm around Fox. Their emotional reunion led many “Back to the

Brooke Shields is the talk of Sundance thanks to Lana Wilson’s explosive documentary “Pretty Baby,” which made various headlines after its world premiere due to new revelations from Shields regarding abuse, as well as her candor discussing her “ridiculous” battle against Tom Cruise over postpartum depression. Shields was just as honest while visiting the Variety

If “Polite Society” were a Jane Austen novel, a big wedding would be the happiest of endings, but in the eyes of the film’s feisty teenage protagonist, Ria Khan (Priya Kansara), watching her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) trade her art career for a husband feels like Game Over. If Lena can’t make it as

As a model, Bethann Hardison walked the runway alongside Iman. As an agent, she discovered Tyson Beckford and mentored supermodels like Naomi Campbell. As an activist, Hardison revolutionized the fashion industry. From runway shows in the 1970s to roundtables about the lack of racial diversity in the early 2000s, the former model has seen the

Although Sundance shorts don’t aren’t met with the starry premieres of their feature-length counterparts, there are plenty of strange and wonderful finds — especially for genre fans via the Midnight Short Film Program. One of this year’s standouts was “A Folded Ocean,” written and directed by Ben Brewer. In a 14-minute tale of sex, romance and

On the evening of July 23, 1982, “Animal House” director John Landis was filming a tricky nighttime helicopter scene for “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” The wide-open spaces of Indian Dunes, now part of Santa Clarita, Calif., were standing in for Vietnam, and the scene called for soldiers in a helicopter to pursue actor Vic Morrow,

Shekhar Kapur, who directed Heath Ledger in the 2002 epic “The Four Feathers,” has paid fulsome tribute to the late actor as the 15th anniversary of his death approaches this weekend. Ledger had a brief but bright career as a leading man, scoring Oscar and BAFTA best actor nominations for Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” (2005).

Bangladeshi auteur Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s “Saturday Afternoon” has finally been cleared for release after a four year struggle with the Bangladesh Film Censor Board. The Bengali-and-English-language film takes its cue from the brutal terrorist attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka in 2016, which took place on a quiet Saturday afternoon and left more

There’s a great deal of visual enchantment in “Deep Rising,” if a somewhat murky conclusion to be drawn from it all. This second documentary feature from photographer Matthieu Rytz (“Anote’s Ark”) mixes spectacular views of deep ocean life with a gander at opposing sides in a largely under-the-radar international fight over whether to mine minerals

In “Justice,” the title’s double meaning is, of course, ironic. Amid all the systemic issues spotlit during the agonizing process of Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court appointment — sexism, cronyism, partisanship, cowardice, mudslinging and good old-fashioned lying — justice was one quality largely absent. But it’s an irony that many would say is already present

It’s been less than a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, drastically escalating a conflict that had already been in progress for eight years. Yet the constant churn of the news cycle somehow makes that crisis seem older, less urgent — a dulling of concern underlined by some U.S. conservatives’ desire to halt aid, as if

Following on the heels of international hit “The Dry,” veteran Australian director Robert Connelly has tackled another local literary adaptation in “Blueback,” based on his celebrated compatriot Tim Winton’s 1997 novella. That slender tome (subtitled “A Contemporary Fable”) was aimed primarily at younger readers. The film adopts a somewhat more grownup, realistic, less parabolic tenor,

When an independent filmmaker wants to hypnotize an audience, show off his chops, and make a grand statement, a surefire way to do it — at least if he has the talent ­— is to create his own version of a “Pulp Fiction”-meets-“Boogie Nights” violence-hanging-in-the-air climax set to a succulent needle drop. In “Magazine Dreams,”

Folklore and horror are often two sides of the same coin. Genre filmmakers the world over have either drawn from or created local myths to jangle the nerves of their audience, from “The Wicker Man” in Britain and “The Blair Witch Project” in America to “La Llorona” in Guatemala and “Kwaidan” in Japan. For the

The blush of first love can be electrifying, but also wholly disorienting. There’s a way in which someone’s smile (or body — odor, even) can muster up vexing emotions that feel visceral and involuntary. Writer-director Goran Stolevski’s sophomore effort, “Of an Age,” spends the bulk of its runtime capturing such a blush, and then pushes

“Justice,” a documentary that delves into sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was secretly in the works for more than a year before it was added as a late-breaking addition to the 2023 Sundance Film Festival lineup. Doug Liman (“Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” “The Bourne Identity”) directed the film, which premiered on

After weeks of earsplitting buzz over Jonathan Majors’ Sundance drama “Magazine Dreams,” the dumbbells have finally dropped. As a deeply troubled – yet still sympathetic – aspiring bodybuilder, Majors dazzled Park City’s Eccles Theater on Friday night, earning a standing ovation. Writer-director Elijah Bynum drove the narrative about Killian Maddox, a steroid-guzzling, socially inept loner

Producer Guneet Monga and director Tahira Kashyap Khurrana are teaming again on a new film project. The pair previously collaborated on 2020 short “Pinni,” part of Netflix anthology “Zindagi inShort.” Details of the new film are under wraps but Variety understands that it is a dramatic comedy. It will be produced by Monga’s Sikhya Entertainment

For nearly a century, exóticos have been the clowns of Mexican wrestling: silly, queer-coded characters in flamboyant drag who pranced about the ring for the amusement of homophobic crowds. These hoary stereotypes have long been a part of the tradition of lucha libre — the country’s second-most-popular sport after soccer. Since Mexican wrestling matches are

Michael J. Fox tells his own story in “Still,” which director Davis Guggenheim treats as “a Michael J. Fox movie” by remixing clips from throughout the Emmy-winning actor’s career with cleverly restaged scenes from his private life. That’s a fun way to frame it, seeing as how the emotional crowd-pleaser stars Fox and features so