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.
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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
Arriving more than a half-century after Arthur Penn’s violent folk-ballad “Bonnie and Clyde” tapped into the zeitgeist and caught lightning in a bottle by portraying the Depression-era gangster couple in a manner that recast them as anti-establishment rebels, “The Highwaymen” aims to set the record straight with a respectfully celebratory depiction of the two lawmen
Casey Davies may be the least macho man you’ve ever met. When Casey Davies answers the phone, he is seldom surprised when the caller asks, “May I speak with Ms. Casey Davies?” Callers often assume that Casey Davies is a woman because Casey Davies is a woman’s name. When Casey Davies goes to work, his
The debate taking place in Hollywood about whether Netflix and other streamers should receive awards consideration for their films has made its way to Austin, Tex. for the South by Southwest festival. At the premiere of “The Highwaymen” on Sunday, stars Kevin Costner and Kathy Bates had some thoughts on the merits of theatrical releases
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — The 15th Guadalajara Festival co-production Meeting for feature film projects are taking place this week in the Jalisco capital, running March 8-14. The 2019 Meeting sees the biggest presence in terms of gender diversity in the competition’s history. Among directors and producers participating this year, more than 45% are women. “That wasn’t an
“Who Let The Dogs Out,” the turn-of-the-millennium-era Grammy-winning Baha Men hit, has eclipsed kitsch to become a stadium anthem. And thanks to its peculiar origin story — the hook dates back to 1959 and the song’s ownership is a copyright maze — it’s now the subject of a documentary film, which held its world premiere
Marvel is coming for your indie darlings. Before Taika Waititi, Jon Watts and the Russo brothers were members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster club, they were all indie filmmakers. Thus far Marvel’s decision to collect creatives from smaller pictures has panned out, most recently with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Captain Marvel,” which opened
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association rallied a roster of film world heavy-hitters Saturday at the Ace Hotel’s United Artists theater in downtown Los Angeles for the organization’s first Film Restoration Summit devoted to celebrating classic films and the urgent need to put more resources into saving them. Naturally, the importance of preserving the big-screen experience
March 10, 2019 12:32PM PT Julianne Moore’s “Gloria Bell” has launched impressively with a $154,775 on five screens in New York and Los Angeles for a per screen average of $30,955 for A24. It was the third highest per screen figure of the 2019 domestic box office, topped only by the $35,499 for Disney’s “Captain
Seth Rogen is a big fan of “Roma,” the multi-hyphenate star admitted on a muggy Sunday morning at SXSW, but he doesn’t know how to make movies or do comedy for any other format than a packed movie theater. The theatrical versus streaming debate was top of mind for Rogen, his “Long Shot” leading lady
South by Southwest has a storied tradition of launching studio comedies into the box-office stratosphere—from “Knocked Up” to “Bridesmaids,” “Trainwreck” and “Spy.” On Saturday night, SXSW 2019 most likely found the next underdog hit to add to this esteemed class. “Long Shot” is the story of a secretary of state, Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), who
“We love cinema.” That’s how Netflix began a statement it issued on Twitter in response to Steven Spielberg’s announcement that he will push for new guidelines regarding the eligibility of movies to compete in the Academy Awards. (Though the connection was obvious, the Netflix statement never mentioned Spielberg by name.) Spielberg, a member of the
UniFrance, the French film promotion org, joined forces with the The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to host events on March 7-8 in Paris which aimed at shining a spotlight on French female directors, producers, talent, artists and technicians. The events, which were attended by many French students and young filmmakers at the
If we’re being honest, I thought “Captain Marvel” was fine, often good. It’s a bummer in some sense, because if I liked it less, it’d help make my point a little bit easier. There are people, however, who do not like “Captain Marvel” for reasons valid and not. I say this because: I am dying
Brie Larson’s “Captain Marvel” is showing plenty of international power with a $302 million international launch — the fifth highest of all-time. With an impressive $153 million debut in North America, Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe title totaled a global opening weekend of $455 million, or the sixth highest global debut and the biggest opening of
March 10, 2019 9:33AM PT “Birds of Passage,” Cristina Gallego’s and Ciro Guerra’s sprawling epic film tracing the origins of the Colombian drug trade, took home the $40,000 Knight Marimbas Award (the top grand jury prize) Saturday night at Miami Dade College’s 36th annual Miami Film Festival. The south Florida gathering celebrated cinema with an
Brie Larson’s “Captain Marvel” is soaring to a heroic opening weekend of $153 million in North America at 4,310 sites, reviving what had been a slumbering 2019 box office. “Captain Marvel” took in $302 million internationally, giving it an estimated global opening weekend of $455 million — the sixth highest global debut of all time.
GUADALAJARA, Mexico — In the world, it would be hard to choose a more exciting figure to introduce a masterclass than Guillermo del Toro, and even more so when that talk is given in the filmmaker’s hometown of Guadalajara Mexico at a festival he has been involved with for its entire 33-year existence. If the
GUADALAJARA — Chilean production company Equeco is at this year’s Guadalajara Intl. Film Festival to pitch a new project, “Pepperoni.” The immigration-themed dark comedy will be the second feature of festival favorite, D.J.-turned-director Tomás Alzamora, better known in Chile as DJ Four-D, who shared exclusive first details with Variety in the lead-up to the Mexican
What if the woman who had been your babysitter when you were 13-years-old went on to become Secretary of State, and was now positioned to be the first female president of the United States? If you were Fred Flarsky (picture a Seth Rogen character more or less identical to every other Seth Rogen character, only
Shia LaBeouf made some frank and emotional statements about his personal struggles on the set of “The Peanut Butter Falcon,” his Mark Twain-inspired indie film that premiered at the SXSW film festival on Saturday in Austin, Texas. Zac Gottsagen, an actor with Downs and the film’s lead, also revealed to the Q&A audience how his
Just when you think you’ve got Shia LaBeouf figured out, he goes and makes a film like “The Peanut Butter Falcon,” a sincere, Southern-fried buddy movie in the tradition of “Forrest Gump,” from two of the producers responsible for “Little Miss Sunshine.” This was the film LaBeouf was shooting when he was arrested for public