Month: October 2023

Andrea Riseborough takes on the pleasure and pain of love in Channel 4 series “Alice & Jack,” created by Victor Levin. “This frustration of really appreciating someone and also not being able to understand them or be understood, that’s such a common connection we have in life,” she tells Variety ahead of the show’s MipCom premiere. She
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Gigi Hadid was called out by the State of Israel Instagram page for a post she shared related to the Israel-Hamas war. The supermodel shared a graphic to her Instagram story that read: “There is nothing Jewish about the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. Condemning the Israeli government is not antisemitic and supporting Palestinians is
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Cinema has been a little duller for the eight-year absence of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the Indian-born auteur whose flamboyant formal style carried over from the music video realm into a distinctively sensuous strain of mainstream fantasy filmmaking — halted by the relative disappointment of 2015’s lackluster Ryan Reynolds vehicle “Self/less.” That makes Singh Dhandwar’s return
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Ideally timed to Disney’s centennial, a short film entitled “Once Upon a Studio” assembles 100 years’ worth of animated characters from the company’s vaults for a group photo outside Walt Disney Animation Studios headquarters in Burbank, Calif. That’s the building, shaped like Mickey Mouse’s conical blue hat from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” where the walls are
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Taylor Swift‘s “The Eras Tour” concert film officially opened to $92.8 million in North America and $30.7 million internationally, bringing its first weekend tally to a massive $123.5 million globally. These ticket sales are slightly below Sunday’s estimates of $95 million to $97 million domestically and $126 million to $130 million worldwide, but wildly impressive
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Netflix’s “American Symphony,” which follows Grammy and Oscar winner Jon Batiste as he prepares for his performance at Carnegie Hall, leads the 2023 Critics Choice Documentary Award nominations with six, including best documentary feature and directing for Matthew Heineman. PBS’ “20 Days in Mariupol,” Magnolia Pictures’ “Kokomo City” and Apple Original Films’ “Still: A Michael
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Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the company that played a huge role in the music-catalog gold rush of recent years, has abandoned plans to pay a dividend after drastically reducing the amount it expects to receive from royalty payments, according to the Guardian and other news reports. The reduction stems from the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board’s decision
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Before Matthew Vaughn earned critical acclaim for rebooting the “X-Men” movie franchise with 2011’s “X-Men: First Class,” he was courted to replace Bryan Singer as the director of 2006’s “X-Men: The Last Stand.” That tentpole served as the third film in the storyline led by Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, but Vaughn recently revealed at New York
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Millie Bobby Brown told Glamour magazine (in an interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike began) that she will not mourn the end of “Stranger Things,” which is set to film its fifth and final season once the strike is resolved. “When you’re ready, you’re like, ‘All right, let’s do this. Let’s tackle this last senior
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“Air” director, producer and star Ben Affleck will receive the first-ever Gotham Visionary Icon and Creator Tribute at this year’s Gotham Awards ceremony. The tribute award was created for this year’s ceremony to recognize cultural icons and the filmmakers responsible for bringing those icon’s stories to life. The Gotham will honor the visionaries behind the
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MK2 Films has acquired a collection of films and TV series directed by Bruno Dumont, the award-winning French director behind “Life of Jesus,” “Slack Bay” and “Humanity.” The acquisition, unveiled during Mipcom Cannes, covers the bulk of the director’s work, spanning eight films and TV series including “Li’l Quinquin,” which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.
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Viaplay Content Distribution has partnered up with German broadcaster ARD Degeto to co-produce “Ronja the Robber’s Daughter,” an epic adventure series. ARD Degeto will join the series’ existing co-production partners, Filmlance International, Film i Väst and Ahil Films. Along with co-producing, ARD Degeto will also premiere “Ronja” in Germany — in addition to other Viaplay
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Riz Ahmed has posted an impassioned plea on social media calling for “an end to the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza’s civilians” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. “We are told there are two sides to what is happening in Israel and Palestine. But in my heart, I know there is only one —
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Two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne shared his passion for film and his thoughts on contemporary American cinema with the audience at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon where he is premiering his eighth feature film, “The Holdovers,” under the French title “Winter Break,” on October 15th. In a conversation skilfully led and translated by Los
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Mipcom Cannes, the international TV conference, opened on a solemn note with market director Lucy Smith paying tribute to the “innocent victims in Israel and Gaza.” Smith addressed the reverberations of the Israel-Hamas conflict at the market and within the industry. Out of the 70 Israeli industry executives who had registered for Mipcom, only a
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‘ELSBETH’ FLIES TO FRANCE Paramount Global Content Distribution has licensed the highly anticipated CBS Studios series “Elsbeth” to TF1 in France. Starring Emmy Award winner Carrie Preston, “Elsbeth” is based on the popular character of Elsbeth Tascioni, the astute but unconventional attorney featured in “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight.” “The series has been
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Warner Bros. Discovery will be launching its streaming service Max in France, one of its top European markets, next summer, Variety has learned. The launch in France and in Belgium will follow a rollout in 22 countries across the Nordics, Iberia, Spain, the Netherlands and Central Eastern Europe in the spring. The European plan was
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Veteran media exec Christian Toksvig is launching Cocoa Media, a distribution company dedicated to placing content on Free Advertising Supported Television (FAST) platforms. Cocoa has pacted with cutting edge Turkish content aggregator Merzigo to bring Turkish dramas into the FAST sphere. Toksvig, a former SVP Of HBO Max In EMEA who previously served as commercial officer
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TIGER LEAPING TO HOLIDAY FRAME India’s Yash Raj Films has set a mid-November release date through the Diwali holidays for “Tiger 3,” its anticipated spy-action film starring Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif and Emraan Hashmi. Holiday complexities have caused the company to devise what it called a “strategic and unique release plan.” Having previously only released
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