Month: January 2024

A mother and daughter both come of age in “Girls Will Be Girls,” Shuchi Talati’s gentle English-Hindi high school drama set in the Himalayan foothills. In this engrossing feature debut about angst and desire, the draconian Indian boarding school setting robs its teen protagonist of the language to express (or fully understand) her burgeoning sexuality.

There’s a moment in Titus Kaphar’s “Exhibiting Forgiveness” that speaks volumes about how trauma — racial, historical, personal — can destroy a person, even as the scene barely offers an explicit word about it. Tarrell (André Holland), an artist who paints dreamy neon-rainbow-hued suburban fantasias, has reconnected with La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), the estranged father he

The list of accomplishments high school student Emily Worthmore reels off early in “Girls State” sounds impressive at first. Then it becomes a bit concerning. It’s not that the personable teen from suburban St. Louis has padded her resume — hardly. It’s that her list has the feeling of a too tightly wound drive to

The U.S. government decided to make an example of Reality Winner, giving the former NSA translator a five-year prison sentence. So it’s only fair that director Susanna Fogel should be able to make an example of her too — only this time, to very different ends. “Winner” is well acted, well told and … well,

Jesse Eisenberg‘s “A Real Pain” stars Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as mismatched New York Jewish cousins. They’re on a trip to Poland in search of the life that their recently dead grandmother lived before the Holocaust. David is a buttoned up neurotic on OCD medicine while Benji is a charming fuckup with no prospects but

For some of us, “American Fiction” has a satirical audacity that’s funny right out of the gate, gathers speed and force on the runway — and then, somehow, just when the comedy should be taking off, it turns muted and moralistic instead. I think the hitch is that after Jeffrey Wright’s Monk sells his fake

Alicia Silverstone was a bright light in the otherwise maligned 1997 superhero movie “Batman & Robin,” playing Batgirl opposite George Clooney’s Batman. Although Clooney has distanced himself from the role in previous years, he showed up in 2023’s “The Flash” in a multiverse cameo. While Silverstone was at the Variety Studio presented by Audible to

The image of Frida Kahlo, the prominent Mexican painter of the early 20 century, is one of the most replicated and commercialized of any artist in the history of the world. From T-shirts to houseware, merchandise of all sorts emblazoned with her face has turned Kahlo into a kitschy, mainstream, decontextualized emblem for Mexican identity.

Saoirse Ronan was knee-deep in lamb goo on the first day of filming “The Outrun,” a searing look at addiction that premiered on Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. Adapted from Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir, “The Outrun” centers on Rona, a recovering alcoholic who returns home to the Orkney Islands in Scotland after spending a

Kerry Washington joined the Variety Studio presented by Audible at the Sundance Film Festival, where she is an executive producer on the documentary “Daughters.” The movie centers on four girls in Washington D.C. as they prepare for a Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers. “People always ask me why I’m drawn to political work,”

If zombies weren’t so fixated on eating our brains, perhaps they’d be poignant to have around: semi-living, semi-breathing semblances of people we’ve loved, there to be seen and held and talked to, not truly present but not absent either. Whether that’s preferable to the void of death is the question underpinning “Handling the Undead” for

One of the most anticipated documentary premieres at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival is “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” which tracks the eponymous star’s rise to Hollywood icon and the near-fatal horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Reeve’s children — Will, Matthew and Alexandra — appear as subjects in

During a recent appearance on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed his role in resolving last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Maher asked Newsom why he didn’t get “more involved” in the strike negotiations, adding, “Why couldn’t the governor say, ‘This is an important industry in our state, one of our

One of the boldest movies premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival is “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” directed by Kobi Libii. The film takes aim at the Magical Negro stereotype and centers on a young man (Justice Smith) who is recruited into a society in which African American members are tasked with ensuring

The Sundance Film Festival prides itself on being a place of innovation and discovery, and this year’s 40th anniversary celebration has an entry that could well check both boxes – “Ponyboi,” a genre-blending road movie featuring writer and star River Gallo. Gallo plays the titular Ponyboi, an intersex sex worker hustling to survive in New

Justice Smith‘s career has taken him to the forefront of major Hollywood tentpoles such as “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” and “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu,” but it has never taken him to the Sundance Film Festival until now. The 28-year-old actor was one of five honorees at the Variety & Golden

In an election year when civil rights are being threatened, authoritarianism is spreading around the globe and minorities are a popular political target, it’s no wonder that films exploring the U.S. criminal justice system are everywhere you look in the Sundance Film Festival lineup. “There’s so much inequality and injustice in the justice system,” says

The not-so-secret fact about premieres is that the actors rarely watch, usually ducking out when the lights go down. They spend the film’s duration smoking cigarettes and reciting the cinema’s version of the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, i.e. the director’s predilection to use my worst

The opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” promise some kind of documentary advertorial for off-the-grid living. Over idyllic shots of her hippy-hunky husband Nik and their three cherubic children camping, foraging for food and literally hugging trees in verdant Norwegian woodland, photographer Maria Vatne’s voiceover soothingly espouses the liberating virtues of “getting out

Thea Hvistendahl’s “Handling the Undead,” fresh off its Sundance premiere, has already scared multiple buyers into submission, Variety has found out exclusively. Starring “The Worst Person in the World’s” Renate Reinsve and sold by TrustNordisk, it has been picked up by Hungary (Vertigo Media), Benelux (September Film), Switzerland (Filmcoopi), France (KinoVista), Spain (Avalon Distribution), Korea

Pauly Shore‘s performance as Richard Simmons is seeing the light of day, less than a week after plans for a feature film biopic were announced. A 10-minute short film starring Shore, titled “The Court Jester,” premiered at the Cabin in Park City on Friday. The event wasn’t an official Sundance Film Festival screening, but was

Paris-based TeamTO – one of Europe’s leading kids’ entertainment companies – is investing in new IP projects to broaden its global reach, while pioneering green production techniques that have set the standard for the French animation sector. The company, with a capacity of up to 700 staff, has developed a high-end production pipeline, primarily catering

Already one of France’s most beloved and bankable actors (“The Stronghold”), Gilles Lellouche is about to graduate as a big-shot filmmaker five years after delivering his sophomore outing, “Sink or Swim,” a B.O. hit which lured more than four million moviegoers (over $35 million) in theaters. His next movie, “Beating Hearts” (“L’amour Ouf”), budgeted in

Recently honored as one of Unifrance’s 10 to Watch, Franco-Moroccan filmmaker Sofia Alaoui will build on the rugged eeriness of her 2023 Sundance jury prize winner “Animalia” with “Tarfaya” – a slow-burn thriller that mines Morocco’s sweeping landscapes for ambient unease. Named for (and inspired by) a remote, coastal town on the country’s Saharan border,