Movies

Karen O & Danger Mouse’s “Lux Prima” is one of the year’s best albums so far — but it’s more than an album. “An Encounter with Lux Prima – The Art of Collaboration,” a short documentary chronicling the 18-month development of their multisensory art installation “An Encounter With Lux Prima” premieres today exclusively on Variety.

Not one mainstream Hollywood film released in 2018 included a trans character, a Thursday report from GLAAD media said. The watchdog’s Studio Responsibility Index, an annual look at wide film releases, grades the big studios on overall LGBTQ representation. The report also scores the integrity of content using GLAAD’s Vito Russo Test. Film’s statistics stand

Willem Dafoe has spent the last two awards seasons on the campaign trail. The actor earned back-to-back Oscar nominations for his work in 2017’s “The Florida Project” and for last year’s “At Eternity’s Gate.” And if the critical reaction to “The Lighthouse” is any indication, he’ll be back on it soon. “The Lighthouse” is director

May 23, 2019 6:08AM PT [embedded content] The Resistance’s war against Skynet rages on with the sixth installment of the “Terminator” series, “Terminator: Dark Fate.” The first trailer for the latest movie dropped on Thursday. The clip opens with two franchise newcomers, Mackenzie Davis and Natalia Reyes, as they’re being pursued by a Terminator (Gabriel

CANNES – Spanish producer-turned director Chelo Loureiro of Galicia’s Ábano Producións has teamed with Spanish multi-hyphenate Emilio Aragón at Caribe Music to produce the upcoming animated feature “Valentina.” Valentina turns on a girl who is tired of having Down syndrome, and believes it to be the reason she’ll never be a trapeze artist. But Valentina’s

Gabriel Abrantes returned to the Croisette this year to attend the screening of his 20-minute fantasy short, Directors’ Fortnight “The Marvelous Misadventures of The Stone Lady.” about a female statue that escapes from the Louvre and ventures into the streets of Paris. The U.S.-born Portuguese director wowed audiences at Cannes last year with his wacky

Since 2005, the Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week and Mexico’s Morelia Intl. Film Festival (FICM) have enjoyed a reciprocal relationship. Each year, a selection of short competition films from Morelia is shown in a special selection at Critics’ Week, with the features from the Cannes section screening five months later in Morelia. The short film

CANNES–Russian director Fedor Bondarchuk and his Art Pictures Studio have released the English-subbed teaser to “Attraction 2,” the sequel to Bondarchuk’s 2017 sci-fi blockbuster, which Variety has acquired exclusively. The director behind record-breaking Russian films such as World War II epic “Stalingrad” was in Cannes this week, where he presented footage from Art Pictures’ slate of upcoming

CANNES–Gkids, the U.S. distributor of 11 best animated feature Oscar nominees, has acquired North American rights for “Weathering With You,” the new film from director Makoto Shinkai and producer Genki Kawamura. Gkids has set an awards-qualifying run for 2019 with a theatrical release in early 2020, in both the original Japanese and a new English-language

May 22, 2019 11:58PM PT Rolling off the success of “Serial (Bad) Weddings 2,” Romain Rojtman is reteaming with UGC and Orange Studio on the the third opus of France’s comedy B.O. hit franchise. “Serial (Bad) Weddings 2” was released on Jan. 30 and grossed over 45 million euros from 7 million admissions in France,

CANNES–The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival has announced a new SVOD service, TIFF Unlimited, which will launch during the festival’s 18th edition, which bows May 31 in Cluj, Romania. The service will curate titles from current and previous editions of the festival, while also showcasing other hand-picked auteur-driven productions, presented in partnership with local distributors. It

The Locarno Festival’s Open Doors platform dedicated to promoting cinema in areas where filmmaking is especially tough, has unveiled the 8 projects, directors, and producers from 7 countries in South-East Asia and Mongolia who will make the trek to Switzerland for networking and training opportunities. The selected projects include “The Thonglor Kids” by Thai director Aditya

CANNES  —  In further evidence of a generally more robust high-end international sales market at this year’s Cannes Film Market, outside China at least, Studiocanal, has secured distribution in 70% of major territories worldwide on $25 million “Around the World,” its banner new animated feature. Written by “Ice Age 2’s” Gerry Swallow and directed by

CANNES  —  August Diehl, star of Terrence Malick’s Cannes competition player “Hidden Life,” acquired by Fox Searchlight during the festival, will head the cast of Tom Schreiber’s upcoming “Beautiful Souls” (“Schöne Seelen”). Lead produced by Ingmar Trost at Sutor Kolonko in Germany, and structured as a domestic co-production with Maze Pictures, “Beautiful Souls” has just

Claude Barras, director of the breakout Academy Award nominated hit “My Life as a Zucchini,” is returning to stop motion animation for his next feature “Sauvages,” a socially conscious tale set in the jungles of Borneo. Producer Rhea Plangg attended this year’s Cannes Film Market to foster negotiations with potential production partners. “Sauvages,” a working

CANNES–The Pop Up Film Residency, a mentorship program launched this year by former TorinoFilmLab artistic director Matthieu Darras and Slovak producer Juraj Krasnohorsky, has announced three new residents, four new hosts, and two new creative partners for 2019. Based in Bratislava, the program offers a three-week residency in Slovakia each month, along with a series

In today’s film news roundup, “Super Pets” has moved back to 2022, “Into the Ashes” gets bought and veteran executive David Gale has a new gig. RELEASE DATE Warner Bros. has pushed back the release of “DC Super Pets” back a year, avoiding opening against “John Wick 4.” The studio announced Wednesday that “Super Pets”

Wood Entertainment has completed sales for France, Germany, Turkey, Italy and Russia for “QT8: The First Eight,” a documentary that chronicles Quentin Tarantino’s first eight films. The first buyers’ screening took place on Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival. Tarantino’s ninth film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” premiered at Cannes on Tuesday night. Producer

A civic Phoenix story is promised and effectively delivered in “Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll,” even if there’s little doubt that what much of the audience will be hoping for from this documentary is Bruce, the whole Bruce and nothing but the Bruce. The film satisfies a good portion of that craving with

May 22, 2019 2:56PM PT The 2007 film adaptation of the “Hitman” video game franchise is … not good. It received a score of 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, with many critics panning its incoherent plot and terrible dialogue. So, why did actor Timothy Olyphant take on the lead role as Agent 47? He had a

“There’s a quote that, ‘You cannot be what you cannot see,’ and we think there’s a lot of truth in that,” says Peter Ash Lee, the New York-based editor behind the Asian-American arts and culture magazine Burdock. “Growing up, we didn’t see many reflections of ourselves in media, and when we did, they were often

Daniel Craig will undergo ankle surgery after sustaining an injury while filming “Bond 25.” “Daniel Craig will be undergoing minor ankle surgery resulting from an injury sustained during filming in Jamaica,” the franchise’s official Twitter account posted. “Production will continue whilst Craig is rehabilitating for two weeks post-surgery. The film remains on track for the

It takes more than just watching “Oh Mercy” to understand exactly why Arnaud Desplechin was drawn to the subject matter of his latest movie, a reasonably engrossing police procedural with roots in a 2008 TV documentary. Something of an unexpected detour in the veteran director’s weighty career, the film combines multiple strands to paint a

With the sequel “A Dog’s Journey” now in theaters, Amblin Partners continues to find ways to release the kind of films that aren’t typical of what dominates American multiplexes these days. An follow-up to the 2017 surprise hit “A Dog’s Purpose,” “Journey” is just another example of the cinematic strategy evident at Amblin, the production

France’s top producer Hugo Selignac, who had a banner year in 2018 with “Sink or Swim” and “In Safe Hands,” is set to produce the next projects of high-profile filmmakers Cedric Jimenez (“The Man With the Iron Heart”) and Quentin Dupieux (“Deerskin”). Jimenez’s project, “Bac Nord,” is an ambitious thriller following a police brigade working

“I Lost My Body,” a dark French animated film from writer-director Jérémy Clapin, has come up trumps in this year’s Critics’ Week program at the Cannes Film Festival, taking the strand’s top honor, the Nespresso Grand Prize. The film, which follows a young man’s severed hand as it struggles to be reunited with its own,

The lead negotiator for Hollywood’s talent agencies has again blasted the Writers Guild and its recent agreement with the Verve agency — and cautioned other agencies against following suit. Verve defected from the major agencies on May 16 when it became the first sizable Hollywood talent agency to sign the WGA’s Code of Conduct. That

May 22, 2019 10:51AM PT Netflix and Forest Whitaker are collaborating on live-action family movie “Hello, Universe,” based on the 2018 Newbery Award winner and New York Times bestselling novel by Erin Entrada Kelly. Playwright and screenwriter Michael Golamco (“Always Be My Maybe”) will adapt the book. Whitaker and Nina Yang Bongiovi (“Fruitvale Station”) of

May 22, 2019 9:15AM PT Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Kenneth Branagh will appear in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, “Tenet.” Clémence Poésy, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine are also joining the cast that includes John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki, and Robert Pattinson. “Tenet,” which is being filmed on location across seven countries, is an action epic evolving from

May 22, 2019 9:14AM PT Eddie Peng (“Operation Mekong” “The Hidden Man”) will head the cast of “Love After Love” the new film by Hong Kong’s Ann Hui. He plays opposite Ma Sichun (“The Shadow Play,” “Soul Mate”). The picture, which started shooting on Wednesday in China, is the story of a young woman from