The singularly idiosyncratic casting of Charlotte Rampling and Willie Nelson as long-married ex-vaudevillians who operate a combination trailer park, horse ranch, and performance venue could be enough of a novelty factor to attract some curiosity seekers to “Waiting for the Miracle to Come.” But the movie itself, a deliberately paced fantasia of remembrance and reconciliation,
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The astonishing five-day haul of $331 million (RMB2.22 billion) for “Avengers: Endgame” in China has set a record for the country’s highest-grossing opening weekend of any film, Western or local, and puts the Marvel finale on track to eclipse in about one week what its predecessor, “Infinity War,” made during its entire monthlong run in the
“Slay the Dragon” is the most important political film of the year, and it may prove to be one of the key political films of the decade. It’s a documentary about gerrymandering, and offhand it would be hard to think of a subject less sexy — or a phrase less inviting to audiences than “a
As with many veterans of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which is being renamed Film at Lincoln Center to mark its 50th Anniversary this week, longtime former executive director Joanne Koch has some stories to tell. “We tried to get Katharine Hepburn at the Chaplin Gala, and she wrote me and said she’d rather
From “Mean Streets” to their upcoming “The Irishman,” Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese have one of film’s most famous (and long-running) actor/director partnerships. The two talked about their decades of work together at the Tribeca Film Festival (which De Niro co-founded) on Sunday afternoon, touching on the dynamics of their partnership, Scorsese’s hesitance to
What must it be like to play poker with Christoph Waltz? For all his charms, subtlety doesn’t seem to come naturally to the German actor. Granted, Waltz was a revelation as the unnervingly charming Nazi colonel in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” but in most of the roles that have followed, he’s tipped his hand with
Olivia Wilde didn’t have trouble finding a diverse cast for her high-school comedy “Booksmart.” “It turns out when you see all actors and you just hire the best people, you actually end up with a really representative set. The problem is most people don’t look at everyone. If we keep drawing from the same pool,
April 28, 2019 10:13AM PT Disney-Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” has set more than a dozen box office records in its first five days — many by wide margins. These are some of the records the superhero tentpole is destroying on its first weekend at the box office: Biggest Worldwide Opening: “Avengers: Endgame” grossed $1.2 billion worldwide.
The city of Vienna will honor composer Gabriel Yared with the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award as part of their Hollywood in Vienna gala Oct. 19, organizers of the annual event announced Sunday. The night before receiving the award, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning Yared is slated to perform selections from his music on piano
Goodbyes can be painful. But, on the big and small screen alike, they can also be enormously profitable and cathartic. The cultural dominance of “Avengers: Endgame,” the conclusion of a 22 or, depending on who is counting, 23 film* saga, and the eighth and last season of “Game of Thrones” demonstrate that audiences are hungry
It’s truly the Avengers’ world. The opening weekend of “Avengers: Endgame” demolished box office records with a stunning $350 million in North America and $1.2 billion worldwide. Disney-Marvel’s fourth and final Avengers superhero movie has captivated moviegoers, accounting for more than four of every five tickets sold domestically. “Avengers: Endgame” topped the year-old “Avengers: Infinity
April 28, 2019 7:19AM PT Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” is poised to complete its five-day opening weekend with a monstrous $329 million haul in China. Provisional figures from local tracking service China Box Office point to a cumulative of RMB2.21 billion, including previews. At a conversion rate of RMB6.72 to the US dollar, a total of
A cappella group Pentatonix is all in for “UglyDolls’” message of embracing what makes one different. Scott Hoying, one of five group members, told Variety at the “Ugly Dolls” red carpet at L.A. Live on Saturday when asked why they were attracted attracted to providing a song for the soundtrack, “We love animated films and
Fans of the legendary British rock outfit Spinal Tap were given a rare treat Saturday night as the band’s core trio reunited for a rare acoustic performance following the Tribeca Film Festival’s 35th anniversary screening of the landmark documentary “This Is Spinal Tap.” David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls delivered a hit-packed set
If you were looking for evidence of Chinese designs on building a modern-day empire, you would have to look no further than Africa: a vast continent whose natural resources – and government borrowing sprees – have helped fuel the engine of China’s economic growth. So goes the conventional logic, at least; yet the reality of
There’s a certain tingle that sets in when you realize that a thriller is naturalistic enough not to rely on thriller tricks. It means that you may be denied some of the knee-jerk pleasures audiences have come to expect — the jump scares and violent climaxes. The tradeoff is that it’s a lot easier to
April 27, 2019 7:21PM PT Sherry Hormann’s compelling feature finds a fresh angle on the “honor killing” dramatized in Feo Aladag’s 2010 drama “When We Leave.” Based on the same real-life “honor killing” that inspired fellow German Feo Aladag’s prize-winning 2010 feature “When We Leave,” Sherry Hormann’s “A Regular Woman” takes a compelling new approach
Jennifer Lawrence and David O. Russell make up perhaps one of today’s most famous director-actor duos. But that partnership almost didn’t happen. Speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival Saturday night for its Directors Series, Russell revealed that Lawrence was the last person cast in both their first movie together, “Silver Linings Playbook,” and their second,
April 27, 2019 5:00PM PT Karen Gillan discussed her dream of directing an MCU film on “The Big Ticket” podcast with Marc Malkin. “I keep asking Kevin Feige when that’s going to be. I’m still waiting,” she said. She clarifies that she “wouldn’t just do any film,” though. “I think it would need to be
Don Cheadle said he was given an hour to decide if we wanted to join the Avengers. And if the pressure wasn’t high enough already, he received the call while putting on his daughter’s birthday party. Cheadle revealed as much when he sat down with Variety‘s Marc Malkin for an episode of Variety and iHeart’s new
You can almost envision a conventional rendering of Mark Webber’s enchanting “The Place of No Words,” the writer-director’s fifth and most ambitiously scoped feature. In that scenario, the magical journey through which a three-year-old grapples with his father’s terminal illness — something he is too young to make sense of in real-world terms — would
Halfway through “Nothing Fancy: Diana Kennedy,” the 96-year-old doyenne of traditional Mexican cooking offers a brisk lesson in making guacamole, complete with a number of strict, sharply emphasized rules: no garlic; serrano chillies only; chop the onion, don’t mince it; never blend the avocado; and if people say they don’t like cilantro, “for heaven’s sake,
When Queen Latifah walked across the stage at her Tribeca Film Festival talk on Friday, moderator and director Dee Rees (“Mudbound”) declared “all hail the Queen.” Looking at Latifah’s career, she’s certainly earned the praise. The actress, musician, entrepreneur, and author started out in hip-hop, a notoriously “misogynistic” industry, she said. When she came onto
“Avengers: Endgame” is on its way to a record-breaking debut — to put it mildly — with an estimated $345 million from 4,662 North American locations. The final installment in the Avengers saga landed an enormous $156.7 million on Friday after a stunning international debut on Wednesday, which included a $107 million opening day in
April 27, 2019 8:17AM PT A movie for the handful of people who’ve wanted to see a young Hillary Clinton portrayed in an insufferably pretentious arthouse drama. Evidently shot in 2016, but premiering on the festival circuit after the filmmakers’ more recent “The Wall of Mexico” (which debuted at SXSW a month earlier), “When I’m
Fans have been hatching theories on how the Marvel heroes could defeat Thanos in “Avengers: Endgame” since “Infinity War” hit theaters last year, but one of the weirder ideas involving Ant-Man is a little more, well, inspired. In short, the theory is that Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, could shrink down and fly up Thanos’
In August 2016, Dr. Tasha Hubbard was working on her doc “Birth of a Family” (Hot Docs 2017) when she learned that Colten Boushie, a young Cree man in Saskatchewan, had died from a gunshot to the back of his head shortly after entering Gerald Stanley’s rural property. The acquittal of Stanley 18 months later by
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in Toronto this week, the Hot Docs Forum will once again showcase some of the most anticipated films slated to hit the documentary world. Over the course of the two-day event, 20 pre-selected projects will be presented to a round table of industry insiders from around the globe, including leading commissioning
The school of thought in which convicts are bad people not to be “coddled” in any way has led to a swelling U.S. prison population for whom by some estimates less than 1% of incarceration costs go toward any kinds of rehabilitation. This would appear counterproductive, as the majority of prisoners do return to the
The last 70 years or so of feminist theory and activism are definitely on the menu in “Bloodroot.” Douglas Tirola’s documentary pays fond tribute to the two women who’ve stayed the course throughout the nearly half-century history of the titular collectively owned vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport, Conn. Their individual stories provide archetypal illustrations of how