Movies

November 10, 2018 8:30PM PT Legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who won an Oscar for the music to “The Hateful Eight,” has labeled the film’s director Quentin Tarantino “a cretin.” Morricone savaged Tarantino in an interview published this week in the December edition of the German-language version of Playboy. He criticized Tarantino on two main

LOS CABOS, Mexico — Adding to its burgeoning best picture trophies, “Genesis,” the consecration of Quebec’s Philippe Lesage, won Los Cabos Competition Award Saturday night. “Genesis” scored at a busy Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival, given star gravitas by Spike Lee, Adam Driver and Terry Gilliam and whose hard-driving industry news flow, especially from the

LOS CABOS, Mexico — The 7th Los Cabos Festival, the most industrially-minded of Mexico’s film events, was the first to take place in full-blown digital OTT revolution. Two TV panels, the biggest ever at Los Cabos, packed out by some of the foremost Latino TV and OT show-runners, producers and directors,  debated the huge, multi-faceted

What’s the best antidote to the political division roiling the United States? Try a very proper British nanny best known for coining the phrase “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” At least that’s what “Mary Poppins Returns” director Rob Marshall and star Emily Blunt claimed during a panel discussion at the Producers

Europe’s mainstay fest for cinematography, newly rechristened EnergaCamerimage, launched its 26th edition and a week of 241 film screenings in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz on Saturday with a guest appearance by Roman Polanski. The controversial but seminal director of classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” took the stage to honor a longtime colleague,

“Yomeddine,” a road-trip movie about an Egyptian leper and a young orphan journeying in search of family, won the Reflet d’Or for best feature film at the 24th Geneva Intl. Film Festival Saturday. The character-driven drama, Egyptian-Austrian director A.B. Shawky’s feature debut, premiered in competition in Cannes, and is Egypt’s candidate for the foreign-language Oscar.

In line with its continued bid to release a diversity of strong titles, Cinepolis Distribution has picked up all worldwide distribution rights to horror drama “My Favorite Birthday” (“Mi Cumpleaños Favorito”) by helmer-scribe Agustin ‘Oso’ Tapia (“Club Eutanasia”). Tapia has described “Birthday” as “a story where two genres collide: Film noir with the supernatural.” The

There’s a feeling you get, sort of like a low-grade fever, when a film franchise is starting to run down. It’s had three or four sequels, it’s going through the motions, there’s no more fresh terrain left to plow. That sensation hovers, like a gray cloud, over “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a movie

Thursday night, when the AFI Fest launched with a starry “On the Basis of Sex” premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, the event opened its 32nd annual edition to a much different festival landscape than it had in previous years. That’s because just one week earlier, Film Independent announced that it was pulling

“Green Book” director Peter Farrelly forgives Viggo Mortensen for using the N-word. “Viggo is a great, good-hearted guy who was trying to make a nice point and it came out horribly wrong and he apologized immediately and knew what he had done,” Farrelly told Variety on Friday at the movie’s AFI Fest presented by Audi

His heart may be small, but that doesn’t mean his box office returns will be. “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch” is looking to top the weekend box office in its debut with an estimated $67 million from 4,141 North American locations. Benedict Cumberbatch voices the titular green Whoville denizen in Universal’s new adaptation of Seuss’ 1957

This year’s Los Cabos Festival hosted two iconic directors in Terry Gilliam and Spike Lee, and the actor who most recently ties the two together, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” and “BlacKkKlansman” star, Adam Driver. On Friday evening, overlooking the famous coastal rock formations at the Resort at Pedregal, Driver engaged in a career-spanning

Filming “Crazy Rich Asians” challenged cinematographer Vanja Cernjul with a scale nearly as epic as the holidays of the Singapore billionaire characters the story revolves around. The Croatian-born veteran of action and fantasy films and TV series (“The Deuce,” “Marco Polo”) was faced with dozens of locations to be covered with a score of characters.

The EnergaCamerimage fest’s main lineup, its competition for best cinematographer, covers a vast range of styles, and honors several fresh visual stylists along with many legends in the field. As festival director Marek Zydowicz puts it, this year’s selection “was particularly tough because of the variety of visual means used to enhance the stories being

Mahershala Ali has accepted an apology from “Green Book” actor Viggo Mortensen for using the N-word on at a screening of their film — but noted that it was not appropriate for his co-star to use the slur. Mortensen used the word on Wednesday night at the ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood during a conversation moderated by

Fathom Events has partnered with Warner Bros. Pictures to bring Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old” to U.S. theaters on Dec. 17 and Dec. 27, Variety has learned exclusively. Tickets go on sale on Nov. 16. Jeff Goldstein, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. Pictures, said, “With this being

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored five up-and-coming screenwriters Thursday as part of its annual Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting program. On hand to present the awards was program director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2”) and fellowship chair Robin Swicord (“Memoirs of a Geisha”). Swicord, who began working with the fellowship more

November 9, 2018 2:04PM PT Barbra Streisand and Guillermo del Toro have joined over 40,000 signatures on a petition to save classic and cult film treasure trove FilmStruck. The subscription-streaming service, which contained over 1,800 contemporary and classic arthouse, indie, and foreign films, announced its imminent closure on Oct. 26 much to the dismay of

November 9, 2018 1:33PM PT Rob Friedman has left Global Road Entertainment, IM Global, and Open Road Films as chairman and chief executive officer two months after Global Road filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Friedman, who has held top executive posts at Lionsgate, Summit, Paramount, and Warner Bros., was expected to depart the positions

Holiday season has already started for “The Grinch” as it heads for a merry $61 million opening weekend at 4,140 North American locations, early estimates showed Friday. Universal-Illumination’s animated comedy is performing right in line with forecasts of between $55 million and $65 million this weekend. Fox’s second weekend of “Bohemian Rhapsody” should lead the rest

After seeing Mimi Leder’s “On the Basis of Sex,” centered on Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at a screening last week, two things became apparent: the RBG drama is a crowd pleaser, and critical minds will object to its basic presentation. Judging by reactions to last night’s AFI Fest opening night world premiere, the

November 9, 2018 12:17PM PT The historic Western town area at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, Calif., where productions including “Westworld” have shot, burned down Friday in the Woolsey fire, according to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation area’s Twitter feed. “Westworld” uses the Western town set to shoot its Main Street scenes. The HBO

“Green Book” actor Viggo Mortensen has released an official apology for using the N-word on a panel proceeding a screening of his film Wednesday at the ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood. “I have no right to even imagine the hurt that is caused by hearing that word in any context,” Mortensen’s statement read “especially from a white man.” News of the

November 9, 2018 10:10AM PT Netflix has acquired Emmanuel Mouret’s critically acclaimed French period drama “Mademoiselle de Joncquières,” which world-premiered at Toronto. The deal for most rights worldwide excludes France, Switzerland, Canada and the Benelux countries. Represented in international markets by Indie Sales, “Mademoiselle de Joncquières” competed in Toronto’s Platform section. The 18th-century love-triangle drama

As a comedian, Sarah Silverman says the type of humor she personally gravitates toward is the really “aggressively dumb, silly humor,” such as fart jokes. But lately, she has become much more known for her political commentary on her Emmy-nominated Hulu show, “I Love You, America With Sarah Silverman,” as well as on her Twitter

Why did veteran cinematographer Robert Richardson, a three-time Oscar winner, agree to work on “A Private War,” the first narrative feature directed by documentarian Matthew Heineman? It had a lot to do with Heineman’s courage and sense of purpose, says the DP. Heineman was nominated for an Oscar himself for his documentary feature “Cartel Land,”

Theatrical documentaries are a risky financial proposition at best. Few have major theatrical runs. However, 2018 saw several exceptional releases garner multimillion-dollar grosses domestically, demonstrating the genre’s cyclical ability to appeal and compete in a crowded field. Five documentaries are among 2018’s top 100 box office grossers: Focus Features’ “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” ($22.6

LOS CABOS Mexico — In “Ana’s Desire,” Ana lives with her young son in an upper-class neighborhood of a big Mexican city. She begins the film, delicately cleared dead leaves from a rose. It is a premonitory symbol. Suddenly, Juan, her long-lost brother, turns up on her doorstep. He has news, he finally confesses, which

Documentaries have a reputation for being, as Jerry Seinfeld put it at the 2007 Oscars, “incredibly depressing.” But not this year. While 2018 has seen its share of high-profile political docus, including Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9” and Errol Morris’ “American Dharma,” audiences seem to be in serious need of inspirational non-fiction films that don’t deal directly

Breast cancer, gun violence, end of life — all weighty topics that many people would like to avoid, let alone watch a film about. But this year three short documentaries not only explore each difficult issue head-on, but also give audiences a new, hopeful and productive way to comprehend and cope with these distressing subjects.