Movies

Argentine helmer Gaspar Noé’s latest feature “Vortex” world premiered in Cannes, where it was greeted with a standing ovation and critical acclaim. Variety spoke to the director at the Unifrance Rendez-vous in Paris this week about the film. “Vortex,” lensed during the 2020 lockdown, follows an elderly couple in a Paris apartment. Shot entirely in

Filmmaker and environmental activist Cyril Dion is planning a follow-up documentary to his Cannes-selected documentary “Animal” as well as his first fiction feature film, adapted from Pierre Ducrozet’s eco-themed novel, “Le Grand Vertige.” Dion first rose to international prominence with his 2015 environmental documentary “Tomorrow,” in which he and co-director Mélanie Laurent highlighted important initiatives

Paris-based sales agent WTFilms, which specializes in genre movies, is presenting Romain Quirot’s sophomore feature film, “Apache: Gang of Paris,” at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris. The pic is an ambitious revenge movie set in early 20th century Paris, when rival gangs were wreaking havoc. The term apache was coined in Paris at the time,

Olivier Dahan’s “Simone, A Woman of the Century” completes the trilogy he began with the Edith Piaf biopic “La Vie en Rose,” starring Marion Cotillard, and “Grace of Monaco,” starring Nicole Kidman. Dahan spoke with Variety during the Unifrance Rendezvous in Paris, where the film had its market premiere. “Simone,” starring Elsa Zylberstein (“Un plus

“Scream,” a reimagining of a horror franchise that appeared to have run out of steam, dominated the box office, earning a scary good $30.6 million. The sequel is projected to earn $35 million over the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, a spectacular result considering that “Scream” only cost $25 million to produce. It

Iranian-born, France-based actor Golshifteh Farahani, who was nominated for a Cesar for “The Patience Stone,” played in Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies,” and now stars in the Apple TV Plus drama “Invasion,” will feature alongside Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud in the cast of Arnaud Desplechin’s “Brother and Sister,” Desplechin tells Variety. The French auteur

“Paper & Glue,” the feature-length documentary that follows French artist JR as he plasters his provocative large-scale images of people in such places as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the U.S.-Mexico border wall and a California supermax prison, has won the top prize at Uruguay’s inaugural arts film festival, ARCA, which wrapped on Friday,

In awards season, the word “snub” gets overused in a major way. A snub, in life, is a deliberate dis. The essence of it is that it’s personal. When an actor fails to make the cut of nominees for a movie award, to call that a snub is to make it sound like a conspiracy

Directors will tell you that every film is personal. Certainly, the amount of time and effort spent on even the most seemingly formulaic project demands an enormous investment from its creators just to get the movies made. In 2021, several filmmakers brought stories to the screen that began to gestate long before they started directing,

We live in a golden age of historical fiction, from Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” adapted for television by Barry Jenkins, to Mark Sullivan’s bestseller “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” in development by Pascal Pictures, to Hilary Mantel’s novel “Wolf Hall,” adapted into a BAFTA-winning BBC limited series as well as a Broadway and West End

To craft the looks of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” costume designer and frequent collaborator Mark Bridges turned to references including high school yearbooks and store catalogs that showed how middle-class residents of the San Fernando Valley might have looked in 1973. “The yearbooks would verify we were on the right track and were incredibly

Do you like scary movies? North American audiences still do, even as most other theatrical releases continue to struggle amid a pandemic. “Scream” is the latest horror film to make a sizable impression at the domestic box office, with an opening weekend that should finally dethrone “Spider-Man: No Way Home” after the Marvel entry’s four-week

The writing and directing races are being dominated by familiar faces, which can break some records in Oscar’s history. Suppose the Variety awards circuit Oscar predictions charts are to be believed. In that case, eight of the top 12 candidates for director are former nominees and winners, leaving little room for first-timers, such as Maggie

“The Power of the Dog” editor Peter Sciberras was drawn to the psychological tension woven into Jane Campion’s script. That tension underlined the relationship between the Burbank brothers Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), as well as their dealings with George’s wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), or the tense dynamic between Phil and Rose’s son

The battle over how Hollywood studios share profit with talent and creatives has been raging since the invention of movies. The current tensions have ratcheted upward due to the advent of the streaming wars and the new business models the deep-pocketed players have developed. While Disney recently settled a compensation spat out of court with

To shoot “The Hand of God,” Paolo Sorrentino returned to his roots and did a lot of things backwards. “After 20 years of filmmaking I was perhaps a bit tired of the spot I was in,” he says. So in tackling the autobiographical story — which brought him back to his native Naples two decades

“Italian Studies” begins on that most minor, familiar but nonetheless disorienting of social embarrassments: You run into a person who knows you, but you cannot for the life of you remember them. For most of us, it’s a simple slip of the memory. For London-based writer Alina, confronted with a blank space in her brain

“C’mon, C’mon” is a buddy road movie of sorts, as Joaquin Phoenix, as Johnny, a radio journalist, tries to bond with and care for his 9-year-old nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), but struggles in difficult circumstances. Ultimately, the exploration of family, parenting, relationships and responsibility, director Mike Mills says, means that the “hidden center” of the

Chukotka, where Indigenous teenager Lyoshka (Vladimir Onokhov, perfectly expressive despite a face that could be carved from stone) lives a hardscrabble life in a remote whaling village, is the easternmost part of Russia. Beautiful in a forbidding, raw-boned way, with about half its territory above the Arctic Circle, it is separated from the westernmost Alaskan

Filmmaker-actor Tim Blake Nelson commands the screen in the Western thriller “Old Henry,” written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli. Nelson’s intense performance as a man driven to extremes in order to protect his son in early 1900s Oklahoma drives the narrative. What appealed to you most about the script? I’ve always loved Westerns. It was

“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” The VFX team at MPC Film was responsible for animating the Mini-Pufts scene for “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” “It was one of those moments when you remember why you wanted to be an animator and work in VFX,” says MPC Film animation supervisor Christophe Paradis. In one memorable sequence, the mischievous Mini-Pufts marshmallows cause havoc

Jonah Hill is not a fan of “The Mandalorian” despite Leonardo DiCaprio’s best efforts to get his friend and frequent co-star hooked. Hill told W Magazine that he often does not watch science-fiction films and television series because “I used to have a rule: If it didn’t happen or it couldn’t happen, then I just

Breezy dresses and swimsuits were the staple wardrobe for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter,” now streaming on Netflix. With filming taking place in Greece, costume designer Edward K. Gibbon turned to Athens vintage stores to build custom looks for the film’s cast. Olivia Colman anchors the film, as Leda, a college professor with two adult

Alec Baldwin turned over his phone to authorities on Friday as part of the investigation into the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust,” nearly a month after investigators obtained a search warrant allowing them to seize it. Baldwin gave the phone to law enforcement in Suffolk County, N.Y., who will download the data and

Joy Oana is joining Blumhouse as head of human resources, a position with oversight across the company’s film and television arms. Oana replaces Karine Shahar, who is leaving the company to re-start her own HR consultancy, Strategic Global Talent. “I’m looking forward to working with the entire Blumhouse team,” said Oana in a statement. “The

There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than wringing a franchise for all its worth in terms of sequels, prequels, reboots and spinoff. No Hollywood franchise is ever truly dead, although there may be a decades-long gap in between installments. The latest franchise to be resurrected is “Scream,” Wes Craven’s famous horror series of meta-slasher movies. The

New Jersey is accelerating its efforts to bring TV and film productions to the Garden State with the expansion of its tax incentive program. As part of that effort, PR veteran Darryl Isherwood has been appointed senior adviser for economic development communications and the sector lead for film and digital media at the New Jersey

The holiday season was supposed to be a celebratory time for New York City’s theater and live events industries, marking a period of revival after months of setbacks and closures related to COVID-19. But omicron, a fast-moving and highly contagious variant of the virus, had other plans. Its spread has led several Broadway and off-Broadway

French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who made waves with stylish works of 1980s cinema including “Diva” and “Betty Blue,” died Thursday at 75. He died at home in Paris after a long illness, his brother told Le Monde. Beineix started out as an assistant director to filmmakers including Claude Berri, Rene Clement and Jerry Lewis. After

Never underestimate people’s ability to rationalize. To paraphrase Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” our minds find ways to make sense of the nonsensical, not merely as stories but in order to move forward. It’s human nature, or as close to an understanding thereof that I can muster. Our capacity to rationalize is how we get