Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, which was granted a six-month debt waiver in May from a French commercial court to find a white knight, has posted a 34% year-on-year drop in its annual revenue and a loss of $125 million for the financial year that ended March 31. The Paris-based company generated $170 million in annual revenues
Movies
A nine-year-old boy raised in a house full of women is determined to find his missing father, a man who he believes vanished after the Kosovo War. The five women he shares a home with meanwhile carry the burdens of their own wartime traumas, finding common ground in the stories, songs and jokes they share.
“Yesterday” director Danny Boyle asked composer Daniel Pemberton to help actor Himesh Patel become comfortable with the Beatles material he’d be performing. Pemberton hesitated until Boyle promised the job would only last three or four weeks. So Pemberton said yes, and was on the film for a year and a half. In the film, Patel
Nine feature films currently in post-production will be presented this week as part of Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Works in Progress section, a highlight of the festival’s Eastern Promises industry program. The selected projects, which come from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa, will be
Fantasy-drama “Yesterday” has launched with a respectable $1.3 million at 2,200 North American locations in Thursday night preview showings. The Universal-Working Title film, starring newcomer Himesh Patel as an aspiring songwriter, has been forecast to debut in the $10 million range this weekend at 2,603 sites. “Yesterday” is set in an alternate reality in which Patel’s
June 28, 2019 4:40AM PT Brad Leland scores as a Texas high school football coach who pushes his players too far in Rob Smat’s indie drama. Perfectly cast as the most overbearingly demanding Texas high school football coach to appear on screen since Jon Voight made life miserable for James Van Der Beek in “Varsity
“Let There Be Light,” a contender for the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, takes on troubling issues confronting Eastern Europe as a Slovak father, pushed to work abroad in the hopes of buying his family a better life, discovers his absence has allowed his eldest son to drift into a dangerous political
Eve works as a maid at the upscale Hotel Presidente Intercontinental in Mexico City. Every room she enters is a chore — changing linens, scrubbing toilets and so on — but also a window into lives more luxurious than her own. Left alone with the affairs of the hotel’s rich guests, Eve indulges her curiosity.
Czech documentarian Helena Trestikova has won accolades worldwide for her decades-long chronicles of ordinary subjects struggling through life as seen in “Rene” and “Mallory.” With her portrait of Milos Forman’s life, work and philosophy, “Forman vs. Forman,” she takes on a different kind of target, working to find new insights from archival materials. Working with
June 28, 2019 2:52AM PT Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s “Farming” has scooped the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s acting credits include “The Bourne Identity,” and “Suicide Squad.” “Farming,” about a black member of a white skinhead gang in 1980s Essex, is his directorial debut. The winner was
In today’s film news roundup, AMC starts Artisan Films, Gravitas buys “Boy Genius,” Nesta Cooper gets cast opposite Salma Hayek and Rebel Road launches P12 as a distributor. MARKETING MOVE AMC Theatres is launching a new program, AMC Artisan Films, as a programming-marketing effort to put a spotlight on character and narrative driven movies as
June 27, 2019 3:26PM PT Sony Pictures is the latest studio to opt out of next month’s San Diego Comic-Con, joining Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. on the sidelines for the July 18-21 event. Sony also decided against making a presentation in April at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. The studio staged panels at Comic-Con last
If you thought David Dunn, Bruce Willis’ character from M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable,” was a melancholy superhero, he’s the life of the party compared to Dominick, a Parisian introvert whose power to turn invisible has made him profoundly unhappy in the French drama “Blind Spot.” The third feature from directing duo Patrick Mario Bernard and
At the beginning of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers,” his 2003 tribute to the French New Wave, Matthew, the naïve American studying in Paris, refers to true lovers of cinema as “the insatiables.” James Franco, with his 150 acting credits, 39 directing credits, 25 writing credits, and single credit as “boom operator,” is one of the
June 27, 2019 1:31PM PT Amy Stoch and Hal Landon Jr. have signed on to reprise their original roles for “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” while “SNL” star Beck Bennett is set to join the cast. Stoch and Landon Jr. will reprise their roles as Missy and Ted’s father (police chief Chet Logan), respectively.
If you’ve already binged your way through the latest season of “Handmaid’s Tale” and all of “Catch-22,” worry not because Hulu is here to cure your mid-vacation content slump with a whole new slate of titles coming to the streamer this July. Watch Kristen Bell reprise her role as the titular character in Season 4
Independent film stalwart Ben Barenholtz, longtime supporter of David Lynch and the Coen brothers, died Wednesday in Prague after a brief illness. He was 83. Barenholtz had been living in Prague at the time of his death, according to his friend Sony Pictures Classics executive Tom Prassis. He died in his sleep surrounded by friends,
June 27, 2019 12:00PM PT Henry Cavill is set to take on the iconic role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in Legendary’s “Enola Holmes,” starring Millie Bobby Brown. “Enola Holmes” is based on the Nancy Springer book series “The Enola Holmes Mysteries,” which follows Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes’ much younger sister, Enola. Helena
Early reviews have come swinging in for the latest Spider-Man flick. The consensus: a fun and satisfying sequel to “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” although it might tread over too familiar territory and be a bit overlong. “Spider-Man: Far From Home” currently stands with a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes — the same score as its predecessor “Homecoming.” As
June 27, 2019 11:00AM PT Mary J. Blige, Michael McKean, Odeya Rush and Evan Ross have joined Jessica Barden in the drama “Pink Skies Ahead.” The Kelly Oxford film tells the story of a wild young woman, played by Barden, whose life unravels after dropping out of college, moving in with her parents, and being
Five months after strutting out of the Sundance Film Festival with a bag full of splashy acquisitions, Amazon Studios has been thrown off balance by a box office losing streak and the departure of one of its top executives. One of its highest profile Sundance buys, Mindy Kaling’s “Late Night,” has proven to be a
June 27, 2019 10:24AM PT The Toronto International Film Festival is adding an awards program to its starry lineup. This year’s Tribute Gala will take place Monday, Sept. 9 with Participant Media receiving the TIFF Impact Award. A female talent on the rise will be honored with the inaugural Mary Pickford Award, named in honor
June 27, 2019 10:21AM PT Longtime Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper will resign his post after next year’s gathering in Utah. After an 11-year run shepherding the Robert Redford-founded gathering in Park City, Utah, Cooper will move to an emeritus director role being created for him. This January will mark his 30th consecutive festival.
June 27, 2019 9:00AM PT Paul Rudd is in final negotiations to join Sony’s latest installment of “Ghostbusters.” Sources tell Variety Rudd will play a teacher in the film. Carrie Coon is also in talks for the not-so-secret project along with “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard and “Gifted” star Mckenna Grace. Jason Reitman, whose father
The Motion Picture Editors Guild will honor veteran post-production executive and producer Martin Cohen with its Fellowship and Service Award. Cohen worked at Amblin, DreamWorks and Paramount. He was a co-producer on “The Hunger Games” and supervised the restoration Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” trilogy and “Jaws.” The award recognizes an individual who embodies the values set
Disney’s big return to the Pride Lands looks to be a lucrative one. Jon Favreau’s high-profile remake of “The Lion King” is eyeing a massive $150 million opening when it hits theaters on July 19, according to early tracking. That number could fluctuate in weeks to come as Disney ramps up its marketing push. Box
June 27, 2019 7:20AM PT Warner Bros. and New Line’s “Annabelle Comes Home” earned a solid $7.2 million on its first day of release. The supernatural horror film is getting a jump on the weekend by opening on a Wednesday. It’s expected to collect $30 million from 3,525 venues over its first five days in
The Red Sea International Film Festival, which is Saudi Arabia’s first international film fest, has officially announced its team and set March 12-21, 2020, as the dates of its first edition. The event is to be held in the historic district of Jeddah, which is a Unesco World Heritage site. As anticipated by Variety, former Dubai
June 27, 2019 3:43AM PT ZED, the Paris-based production company, is joining forces with CCTV9, the factual channel of the Chinese public broadcaster, to produce “Wild Treasure of China,” a 4K-lensed wildlife documentary series. Lensed in the wild landscape of China, the series will shed light on rare species which are repopulating these areas. The
Picture Tree Intl. has acquired the rights to Carolina Hellsgård’s “Sunburned,” the follow-up feature to her zombie drama “Endzeit – Ever After.” PTI will be presenting first footage from the film, currently in post-production, at this year’s German Films Previews (July 3-6). “Sunburned” follows solitary teenager Claire on a family holiday in Spain. Neglected by