Movies

Director James Marsh is set to direct a new hybrid animated documentary feature for Submarine and Sandpaper Films. “Oasis, Saving the Baghdad Zoo” (working title), is a feature-length animated documentary partly based on “Babylon’s Ark,” the book about a year-long rescue mission of animals abandoned across Baghdad by Saddam Hussein and his son Uday. Billed

The Locarno Film Festival will be honoring Matt Dillon with a lifetime achievement award, a mini-retro of his films, and an onstage chat. Dillon’s career as an actor and director will be celebrated by the Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema during a ceremony on Aug. 4  in the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande outdoor screening venue,

Oscar-winning actors Geoffrey Rush and Benicio Del Toro will be feted at the 56th edition of the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival, which will run July 1-9. The actors will receive their awards at the festival’s closing ceremony. The Czech event has also revealed its juries. “We are honored and delighted that two extraordinary actors

Fathom Events has planned screenings of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror film “The Thing” with projection in the original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 widescreen after previous screenings displayed the film in a cropped ratio of 1.85:1. Over this past weekend, Fathom held screenings celebrating the 40th anniversary of Carpenter’s classic. However, many ticket buyers were disappointed

Sony made a splash at the CineEurope conference in Barcelona with British star Aaron Taylor-Johnson on the ground to tease David Leitch’s “Bullet Train,” in which Taylor-Johnson stars opposite Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock and Karen Fukuhara. Taylor-Johnson, who just wrapped the shoot of “Kraven the Hunter,” introduced 15 minutes of footage of the action-packed comedy

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four has included box office blockbusters like the billion-dollar-grossing “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” ($942 million worldwide and counting), plus the MCU’s first foray into television with hits like “WandaVision” and “Loki.” But what Phase Four has lacked for a majority of MCU

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. The Avengers’ earliest adventures, which were first printed on the page in 1963, are revisited in a new Marvel anthology that releases next month. Titled “Avengers Vol 1: 1963-1965,” the gigantic collection showcases Jack

For Pixar’s latest feature, “Light- year,” director of photography Jeremy Lasky worked with production designer Tim Evatt and lighting DP Ian Megibben to establish the look of the CGI film. Together they decided it needed to be not only cohesive and clear but also cinematic. The movie, in theaters now, is a new adventure about

The official runtime for Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is 159 minutes, but that’s nothing compared to the 240-minute cut that the filmmaker had to trim down into a releasable theatrical cut. Speaking to Radio Times, Luhrmann confirmed that a four-hour “Elvis” cut exists with scenes that include the music icon’s infamous meeting with Richard Nixon. “I

Though the devastating wildfires that swept across Greece’s second-largest island last summer were the impetus for the Evia Film Project, an environmentally focused event organized by the Thessaloniki Film Festival, it’s with the future squarely in mind that festival leadership launched the inaugural edition, which ran June 15 – 19. To that end, a series

Netflix is bracing for its next round of layoffs as the streaming giant looks to cut costs in the wake of its stock troubles. Impacted staff are expected to be told at the end of the week. It’s unclear what departments are going to be hit, but sources suggest that the cuts could be similar

Bradley Cooper revealed on a recent episode of the “SmartLess” podcast (via IndieWire) that a famous director once mocked him for having 7 career Oscar nominations. The incident occurred at a party during Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” awards season. The music drama boosted Cooper’s Oscar nomination haul from four (three acting noms and a

Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri, the driving force between the “Despicable Me” and “Sing” franchises, was welcomed on stage like a rockstar at Barcelona’s CineEurope event on Monday. Founded 15 years ago, Universal’s co-owned animation banner Illumination is finally getting ready for the release “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in theaters on July 1.

Chris Evans recently told MTV News that he’d be more interested in returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Johnny Storm/Human Torch than as Steve Rogers/Captain America, the latter of whom he played for a decade in various MCU tentpoles. Evans played Human Torch in the negatively-reviewed “Fantastic Four” (2005) and its sequel “Fantastic Four:

It’s hard to escape the deflating sense that Disney’s “Lightyear” has remained stubbornly Earth-bound in its box office debut. At least, that’s the prevailing sentiment that’s greeted the latest Pixar film’s so-so $51 million opening weekend in North America. For industry analysts, those lackluster ticket sales were confounding because Pixar had been box office royalty

Netflix has given a green light to “Believer 2,” a sequel to the 2018 hit crime action film “Believer.” While the first film clocked up 5.06 million spectators and amassed a gross box office of $33.6 million in its theatrical career, the sequel will play only online. The company said that the film will be

For the first edition of the Evia Film Project, a new initiative launched by the organizers of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, the festival’s industry arm, Agora, hosted a series of events looking to bring both environmentally focused films and sustainable film production to the fore. The program was designed to help revitalize Greece’s second-largest island,

Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival is being put on hiatus this year after five successful editions in what could be a precursor to the event being permanently scrapped or radically reshaped. In a statement, fest organizers said “a decision was made to postpone the festival” which was scheduled to run Oct. 13-22 in the Egyptian

Claudia Sainte-Luce’s “El reino de Dios” (“The Realm of God”) and “Carajita” by Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra took home the bulk of the prizes in their respective categories, the Mayahuel for best Mexican film and best Ibero-American film at the 37th Guadalajara Int’l Film Fest (FICG), which wrapped June 18. Festival highlights included a conversation,

Studiocanal has acquired a majority stake in Dutch FilmWorks, a leading film production and distribution company operating in Benelux. Launched in 1998, Dutch FilmWorks produces and distributes 25 films each year, and has built up a library of over 900 Dutch and international films, including the popular family franchise “The Claus Family.” The acquisition of

The inaugural London Action Festival (July 28-31) will open with a screening of “Die Hard,” with director John McTiernan and other guests in attendance at a Q&A. McTiernan’s “Predator” will also screen at the festival. Visual effects in “Jurassic World: Dominion” will be explored via a masterclass from senior visualization supervisor Pawl Fulker, partner and

It had been nearly three decades since a film was last screened in Ciné Apollon, an open-air theater in the resort town of Edipsos on the north shore of the Greek island of Evia. But the arrival of several hundred moviegoers on June 15 for a screening of French filmmaker Coline Serreau’s “La Belle Verte”

Oscar-winning Canadian screenwriter and director Paul Haggis has been arrested in Ostuni, Southern Italy on charges of sexual assault and aggravated personal injury allegedly inflicted upon a still unidentified woman who has pressed charges. According to multiple Italian press reports and a note from the public prosecutor of the nearby city of Brindisi, Haggis is

My father died on Super Bowl Sunday. The night before, he had told me — in his signature style of sincere but “got places to be” — that he was proud of me. He then went to sleep and never woke up. Today, four months later, we celebrate Father’s Day. I’ve always thought the purpose

Every time someone takes a comicbook character the world adores and decides to make an animated movie, there’s a risk they won’t do justice to the original designs. “The Adventures of Tintin” comes immediately to mind, since Spielberg and company made the bold choice of swapping artist Hergé’s appealing clean-line designs with appalling performance-capture zombies.

Lukas Dhont’s “Close,” which won the Grand Prix in Cannes last month, picked up the Sydney Film Prize, the top prize at the Sydney Film Festival, on Sunday evening. Accepting the award via video message Dhont said: “It’s a film that comes from our hearts, that we worked on for a lot of years with

Annecy’s official short film competition is one of the festival’s centerpieces. Many years, at least one ends up snagging an Oscar nomination. Every year, Variety watches the shorts in Annecy’s main competition selection and picks 10 of our favorites. We’re not saying these are the best 10 shorts this year, though four won prizes, but we believe

With a slate of summer blockbusters just around the corner, European exhibitors are hoping Hollywood tentpoles can fuel a post-pandemic rebound for their beleaguered industry. But a bumpy and uneven recovery across the continent suggests the theater business isn’t quite out of the woods yet. How to get the industry back to pre-pandemic levels is

Ethan Hawke, in 30 years, has never portrayed a villain before, so it would be nice to say that in “The Black Phone” he not only plays a serial killer — one of those anonymous madmen who live in a one-story house of dingy brick with a dungeon in the basement — but that he

“Little Nicholas – Happy As Can Be” scooped this year’s Annecy Animation Festival’s top Cristal Award for best feature in a 20 plaudit award adjudication which also saw Wes Anderson win a Jury Award for best commissioned film. The biggest winners at Annecy this year, however, was the Festival itself, animation at large and, when