“Good Boys” is an easy elevator pitch: “Superbad” for ages 8-12 that maintains the sweet confusion of tweens but liberally uses curse words. Executive producer Seth Rogen must have had minimal pushback at distributor Universal Pictures, as the film has the stuff that classic coming-of-age comedies are made of (even an obligatory “Stand By Me”
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Those who find joy in 11-year-olds dropping the F-bomb, and otherwise talking smack they really don’t understand, will be in hysterics for the full hour and a half of “Good Boys.” Anyone looking for a little more in the way of comic inspiration is likely to be disappointed by this mediocre comedy from director Gene
March 11, 2019 6:38PM PT Ethan Hawke plays a newly released ex-con in a slight drama as uncertain of where it wants to go as its hapless protagonist. “First Reformed” last year provided Ethan Hawke with an actor’s dream role in terms of character depth and meaningful conflicts — even if the Academy was practically
United Talent Agency chief executive officer Jeremy Zimmer has pleaded with clients to ignore the Writers Guild of America’s plan for writers to fire their agents next month. Zimmer sent the lengthy email Monday, the day before the WGA and the Association of Talent Agents resume negotiations on revamping the rules of engagement for agents
March 11, 2019 6:20PM PT Since 2008’s “Iron Man,” the Marvel cinematic universe has continued expanding, now numbering more than 20 films. Along the way, the company has developed a reputation for solid technology choices with the large-format ARRI Alexa 65 camera and the Codex Vault 65 on-set media management system as cornerstones of its
Jessica Chastain’s Freckle Films has optioned the movie rights to Dinitia Smith’s historical drama “The Honeymoon: A Novel of George Eliot.” Smith’s novel, published in 2016, recounts Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June, 1880, following her marriage to John Walter Cross, a man 20 years younger. Eliot, who was 60 at the time, was recovering
“Mickey and the Bear” reps an assured feature debut for Annabelle Attanasio, who wrote and directed this straightforward but skillfully nuanced drama about a troubled father-daughter relationship. Camila Morrone plays the titular motherless small-town Montana teen who needs to decide if what she wants from life is more than just being the minder of her
Dennis Quaid’s career is bustin’ out all over. The actor-turned-rocker demonstrated his range Saturday night, taking the stage at Los Angeles music club the Mint with his band The Sharks. The group delivered a raucous set that had the audience of more than 200 on its feet as Quaid danced through the crowd, belted like
In today’s film news roundup, Alex Woolf and Imogen Poots are cast in a crime drama, Laura Dern gets a film festival honor and doggie movie “Buddy” gets distribution. CASTING Alex Wolff and Imogen Poots are set to star in writer/director Joey Klein’s upcoming crime drama “Castle in the Ground.” Wolff is portraying a teenager
Disney’s “Captain Marvel” finally settled the score on one of Hollywood’s biggest misconceptions: Female superheroes can hold their own at the box office. That’s the big takeaway from the opening weekend of “Captain Marvel,” the studio’s first comic-book movie to put the spotlight on a female heroine. “Captain Marvel” — starring Brie Larson — debuted
March 11, 2019 11:30AM PT Alison Brie, Dan Stevens, Sheila Vand, and Jeremy Allen White will star in the horror movie “The Rental,” Dave Franco’s directorial debut. Franco wrote the script with Joe Swanberg. The story centers on two couples who rent a vacation home for a celebratory weekend. “The Rental” will be fully financed
Saturday afternoon brought rising Latinx filmmakers and actors together at Variety’s 10 Latinxs to Watch brunch held in partnership with the 36th annual Miami Film Festival. The festive celebration, which took place at the JW Marquis Marriott’s Boulud Sud restaurant, featured a panel discussion moderated by Variety’s Malina Saval with the following five select individuals
Bugs, Daffy, Porky and the lot are headed to the French-Swiss border where they will open the 2019 Annecy Intl. Animation Film Festival, in what the festival has announced as the world premiere of new episodes of the rebooted franchise titled “Looney Tunes Cartoons.” They will screen ahead of the previously announced opening film “Playmobil:
“The Ballad of Yaya,” “Where is Anne Frank?” and “Musketeers of the Tsar” proved the most-attended of industry presentations among 66 feature projects pitched at this year Cartoon Movie, Europe’s top animated feature co-production forum which ran at the French port city of Bordeaux over March 5-7. A production of Blue Spirit Productions, the company
Steeped in the smell of tacos and burning sugar cane, the sights and sounds of Pahokee, Florida, are portrayed with humid specificity in Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan’s documentary — yet its story will be entirely familiar to anyone who is, or was, a small-town teenager yearning for a bigger pond. Taking the form of
March 11, 2019 10:43AM PT John Friedberg has been tapped as president of STX’s international division for films, the company announced Monday. His promotion comes after David Kosse, the executive who STX tapped in 2016 to oversee its oversea efforts, was poached by Netflix. Friedberg previously served as the company’s president of international sales since
March 11, 2019 10:09AM PT Nordic TV player NENT has inked new deals with MGM and NBCUniversal that guarantee it a raft of their content for its Viasat and Viaplay services. The MGM deal covers the James Bond catalogue as well as the upcoming “Bond 25,” and also gives NENT local rights to the studio’s
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — She’s only been on the job for two months and a half but new Mexican Film Institute (Imcine) head Maria Novaro feels she’s been on the job for much longer. She has hit the ground running, spurred on by Mexico’s new left-wing president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who told his team
Amber Tamblyn, the star of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” films and “Joan of Arcadia,” has moved away from acting in recent years and toward activism. She was deeply involved in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and was one of the founders of Time’s Up, a non-profit organization that was formed in 2018 to combat
March 11, 2019 7:45AM PT With just 18 days to go before the U.K. is set to exit the European Union, Sky has acquired “NYET – A Brexit U.K. Border Farce.” The timely short film hails from Alex Helfrecht and Jorg Tittel’s shingle Oiffy (“The White King”) and will be available to millions of Sky
Over a single opening weekend, composer Pinar Toprak smashed all previous box-office records for women composers in film. She scored “Captain Marvel,” which made $153 million domestically. Until now, the top-grossing films by women composers were Rachel Portman’s “The Vow,” which made $125 million domestic in 2012, and Deborah Lurie’s “Dear John,” $80 million back
Italy-based The Open Reel has taken all international rights to Ricardo Calil’s “Cinema Morocco,” a documentary competition entry at the Guadalajara Int’l Film Festival (FICG), which March 8 -15. “Cinema Morocco” world premiered at the Dok Leipzig documentary and animation festival winning the Golden Dove Next Masters Award. The feature screened at Guadalajara on Sunday 10.
This weekend’s third-best U.S. screen average of the year for “Gloria Bell,” which he produced, or the Oscar last for “A Fantastic Woman,” both point in the same direction: Arguably, no producer in Latin American has been so successful in the last decade as Juan de Dios Larraín. The Ibero-American Mayahuel Larraín will now receive
When the Ramones first performed “Blitzkrieg Bop” at CBGB some 44 years ago, no one could have imagined the song would be heard in virtually every stadium and in multiple TV spots for mainstream products like Coppertone, GoPro, Peloton, AT&T and Taco Bell. And punk rock, the genre of music that the Ramones and so
Chile’s Parox, one of the country’s foremost TV companies (“Gen Mishima,” “Invisible Heroes”), is teaming with France’s Rouge Intl. to develop “Evasion” (Escape), the latest feature film from Cristian Jiménez, director of 2011’s Cannes-selected “Bonsai” and co-director of 2017 Sundance player “Family Life.” Parox founder-producer Sergio Gándara is attending Guadalajara Festival’s Co-production Meeting to seek
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — This week, Mexico’s Guadalajara Festival will honor Chile as its guest country. That serves as further recognition of an extraordinary 15 years after the so-called Newest Chilean Cinema broke out at 2005’s Valparaíso Festival with Matías Bize, Sebastián Lelio and Alicia Scherson bowing first features. During that stretch, Chile, just the seventh-largest
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Chile’s Storyboard Media has granted Variety exclusive access to the teaser for the upcoming Camilo Becerra and Sofía Gómez feature “Quizás es cierto lo que dicen de nosotras” (“Maybe It’s True What They Say About Us”). Storyboard heads Carlos Nuñez and Gabriela Sandoval are at the Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival (FICG), where
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Chile came into this year’s Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival (FICG) as the guest country of honor. Once here, Luis Alejandro Pérez García’s “Piola” stomped around the Guadalajara Construye Works in Progress section like it owned the place, snatching up six of a possible 13 prizes. After the success of Juan Caceres’ “Perro
“Booksmart” besties Molly and Amy pretty much aced high school: Valedictorian and student-body president Molly (Beanie Feldstein) got accepted to Yale, her top-choice university — and the first step in her goal of becoming the youngest Supreme Court justice — while study buddy and super-activist Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) plans to spend some time volunteering in
Lil Peep, the SoundCloud sensation turned genre-blending rap star, was exploring a film career before his death in 2017. At the SXSW premiere of the Terrence Malick-produced documentary “Everybody’s Everything,” about the rapper’s rise and untimely end, filmmakers told Variety that Peep was being pursued to take on his first movie role. Sebastian Jones, a