Month: January 2025

If you don’t know a great deal about bunnies apart from their cuteness, a piece of rabbit-centric trivia you will learn in writer-director Katarina Zhu’s debut feature “Bunnylovr” might just break your heart. Turns out, when bunnies experience a considerable amount of stress or a sudden burst of fear, they might go into a state

The Bob Dylan song choices Timothée Chalamet picked for his “Saturday Night Live” musical appearance were… well, completely unknown to most of the viewing audience. The actor’s dip into more obscure choices delighted many Dylanologists who tuned in, even as his picks defied expectations that he would recreate songs he performed as Dylan in “A

In her feature film work, Palestinian-American writer-director-actor Cherien Dabis has been telling intimately specific familial stories since “Amreeka” (2009). That was the filmmaker’s elegant, modestly scaled and altogether brilliant debut about a Palestinian mother and son, moving from the occupied West Bank to Chicago upon winning a green card lottery. Dabis wasn’t able to seize

After “Blknws: Terms & Conditions” was pulled from this year’s Sundance Film Festival lineup, at the behest of its financiers at Participant Media, the independent movie has a new backer — and will light up snowy Park City with its world premiere after all. James Shani’s Rich Spirit has acquired “Blknws,” buying Participant Media out

In “Bunnylovr,” a slice-of-life dramedy from first-time director Katarina Zhu, a 20-something-year-old New Yorker named Rebecca moonlights as a cam girl after hours of her day job as a personal assistant. But when one of her clients sends her a gift — a fluffy, white bunny — their dynamic takes a toxic turn. Without getting

American writer David Vann’s 2008 book “Legend of a Suicide” is a striking, classification-averse work — not quite fiction or memoir, novel or short story collection — that ultimately amounts to an exercise in potent literary catharsis for its author: Vann veils, rewrites or sometimes fabricates events from his own family history in order to

Benedict Cumberbatch touched down at the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance ahead of the world premiere of his new drama film, “The Thing With the Feathers.” Written and directed by Dylan Southern from the book “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers” by Max Porter, the movie casts Cumberbatch as a grieving father struggling

Filmmaker Rashad Frett is making movies with a mission. “I’m here to make films that bring in humanity,” Frett tells Variety. “Everything I do, I want to not only entertain our audience but inform them on what’s going on. Give them food for thought. To bring the audience a visceral perspective from a situation they’ve

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is the tale of a mother (Rose Byrne) feeling increasingly underwater from all the stresses of daily life. In the movie, Byrne interacts with a few characters played by unconventional actors, including Conan O’Brien as her dead-serious therapist, and A$AP Rocky as a new friend she meets during

In the observational “Folktales,” Oscar-nominated docmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (“Jesus Camp”) once again consider education and social context, a concept that marked their first collaboration, “The Boys of Baraka” in 2005. They follow a trio of teenagers taking a “gap year” at a Norwegian Folk High School in Pasvik, located 300 miles north

Josh O’Connor joined the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance to discuss his new movie “Rebuilding.” He was joined by writer-director Max Walker-Silverman and his co-stars Meghann Fahy, Lily LaTorre and Kali Reis. The drama stars the “Challengers” favorite as a cowboy relocated to a FEMA camp after a wildfire burns down his Colorado

Waving signs that read “Zionism is a death machine” and “the media buries the truth,” a group of pro-Palestinian protestors gathered on Main Street in Park City on Saturday. Roughly 75 people turned out amid snowfall and temperatures in the 20s to express their frustration with “media complicity in genocide” against the backdrop of the

With the snappy casualness of a “day in the life” vlog, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a charismatic Russian teacher who serves as planner and videographer for all of his school’s events, introduces his peculiar small town: Karabash. Known as the most toxic place on Earth due to a copper smelting plant, here the average life expectancy

James Mangold misses the era when movies weren’t embarrassed to make audiences feel something. The director of the Bob Dylan musical biopic “A Complete Unknown” and comic book adaptation “Logan” believes there’s a growing hostility to films that wear “their hearts on their sleeve.” “Most of my generation, my peers, have been generally fascinated by

It didn’t take much for Russell Tovey to connect with “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbird’ star Tom Blyth. The actors first met on Zoom before filming writer-director Carmen Emmi’s gay indie drama “Plainclothes.” “Instantly I was just like, ‘This guy’s the real deal,’” Tovey says on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “He’s

SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses the plot and ending of “Presence,” now playing in theaters. As with many ghost stories, the presence in “Presence” has a good reason to haunt its house. After watching on as the Payne family turns against one another, the Presence that drifts around their newly purchased, bougie abode makes a

I made my first feature over nine years ago, when I was in my mid 20s. We premiered “The Boy Downstairs” at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, and it was all gloriously magical. “This is how movies happen,” I thought. You write a script (it was my first feature screenplay), your first choice actress

“The Perfect Neighbor” delivers a harrowing look at how a small disagreement leads to tragedy. Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary is screening all weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. It follows the murder of Ajike Owens, a young Black mother of four who was shot and killed by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz. Gandbhir uses police bodycam footage

Paris-based sales outfit MPM Premium has acquired international rights to “Cactus Pears” (Sabar Bonda), the feature directorial debut from India’s Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, ahead of its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it is in the world cinema dramatic competition. The Marathi-language film follows Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a 30-something city dweller compelled to

In a recent interview with Elle, “The Last Showgirl” star Pamela Anderson discussed how it feels to miss out on an Oscar nomination for best actress. Anderson, who scored noms at the Golden Globes, Gotham and Screen Actors Guild Awards for her leading turn in Gia Coppola‘s drama about an aging Las Vegas dancer, was

Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg‘s “Flight Risk” is facing no traffic on the runway, lifting off to an easy No. 1 opening in what is turning out to be another sleepy weekend at the January box office. The Lionsgate thriller carried on $4.4 million from 3,161 locations across Friday and preview screenings. Even at that

With an agrarian lineage, Brittany Shyne always knew she wanted to make a film about Black land ownership, so she made “Seeds,” her doc feature debut that premieres Jan. 25 in the U.S Documentary Competition at Sundance. Shyne originally developed the subject as her MFA thesis film, “Seeds” follows the everyday life of Black generational

Of all of the phrases that could begin a light-hearted animated film, the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous is surely among the least likely. But “The Colors Within,” which opens with that plea for God to grant “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” is no ordinary animated film. It is directed

Bad decisions — the kind that can be, if not reversed, at least remedied — are an essential part of adolescence: lapses that teach us about our desires, our impulses, our weaknesses, our essential character, and leave us with no greater damage than a throbbing hangover or a small, smudgy tattoo. Doe and Muna, the

The first time 15-year-old Ahmet (Arif Jakup) smiles broadly on-screen lives up to the cliché that someone’s infectious grin can light up a room. Amid the bright colors of an EDM festival happening in the middle of the forest, the teen with wistful eyes surrenders to an upbeat tune and to the crowd of young