Movies

Sidney Poitier, whose dignity and self-assertion ushered in a new era in the depiction of African-Americans in Hollywood films as the civil rights movement was remaking America, has died, a spokesperson for the Bahamian Prime Minister confirmed to Variety. He was 94. Poitier was the oldest living winner of the best actor Oscar — just

The Oscar shortlists were announced Dec. 21, and for some, it was an early holiday gift, as well as marking the ramp-up of awards season as showbiz starts to hone campaigns and voters start to really survey the contours of the myriad kudos on offer. DOCUMENTARY FEATURE Some 138 films were eligible for this category,

Peter Bogdanovich helped usher in a new era in Hollywood with “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon,” films that played homage to the movies from an earlier age, but movies that revolutionized the form with a fresh style and sexual frankness. But many people recognize Bogdanovich not for his directing, but for his role

In a potential windfall for New York’s film industry, Lionsgate Studios is now open for business. And when the $500 million Yonkers, N.Y., operation expands to a million square feet and 12 soundstages by mid-2023, it will become one of the largest production facilities in the East Coast. Great Point Studios (GPS), which is building

First reactions for Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s “Scream” have arrived online, and it appears the fifth time is the charm for the long-running horror franchise. Film journalists are calling the new entry “a fittingly loud, bloody good time at the movies” and the best “Scream” movie since Wes Craven’s 1996 original. Franchise veterans Neve

UPDATE: The European Film Market, which runs alongside the Berlin Film Festival, will be held online for the second consecutive year due to the pandemic. The festival, meanwhile, hopes to be maintained as an in-person event, Variety can reveal. Organizers have confirmed that the EFM has changed gears following a rise in COVID-19 cases in Germany.

Fast-growing indie sales, distribution and production company Alief has acquired the global sales rights to writer-director Amanda Kramer’s “Give Me Pity!” which will world premiere at the upcoming International Film Festival Rotterdam on Jan. 29 in an honored position as the closing film of the event’s Filmmakers in Focus section. Following its world premiere, which

BOOK “Irrfan: Dialogues with the Wind,” a book about the experiences of Geneva-based filmmaker Anup Singh who directed the late Indian actor Irrfan Khan in two acclaimed films — “Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost” (2013) and “The Song of Scorpions” (2017) — will be published by Copper Coin on Feb. 14. Khan, India’s

Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s “Assault” and “Kung Fu Zohra” from Mabrouk El Mechri are among the lineup at International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) 51st edition. The films were among 10 features selected for the Big Screen competition, which aims to bridge the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema. IFFR also boasts the Tiger Competition for emerging

As many as 85 films and a record 55 market premieres will screen at the Rendez-Vous in Paris, a week-long event organized by French promotion org Unifrance. The event will open on Monday with the world premiere of “Simone: A Journey of the Century,” a biopic of Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became health

Looks like 2022 is off to a promising start, courtesy of “See for Me,” a home-invasion drama in which the young woman tasked with defending said home — and, just as importantly, the cat who lives there — is blind. It’s rare that the first week of the year brings a notable performance, but Skyler

Global cinema box office reached $21.4 billion in 2021, according to calculations by researcher Gower Street Analytics. Powered by a “Spider-Man: No Way Home” surge in the last month, the annual total is a 78% gain on 2020. But last year’s cumulative was less than half of the $41.3 billion average of the three pre-pandemic

A biopic of iconic actress Audrey Hepburn starring Rooney Mara is in the works at Apple, Variety has confirmed. Oscar-nominated “Call Me by Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino will helm the project, with Mara producing and “The Giver” co-writer Michael Mitnick penning the script. Though plot details are being kept under wraps, Hepburn is an acting

A Frankensteinian mashup of sci-fi and torture-porn horror tropes, Danish “Breeder” is the kind of movie whose gloss of (eventual) empowerment lies awkwardly atop a story over-enthusiastically focused on women’s degradation and abuse. While there are vague pretensions toward seriousness in Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen’s screenplay and Jens Dahl’s direction, this thriller ends up discomfitingly most

Will 2022 be the year the film release calendar returns to semi-normalcy? No one knows yet, but while many movies premiered directly on streaming last year, there are dozens of big titles set for theatrical-only debuts, from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” to “Avatar 2.” Streaming offerings will also continue to represent strongly, with Netflix planning

Is anyone having a year like Andrew Garfield’s? Following a lengthy stage hiatus (which nabbed him a Tony Award), the actor stormed the fourth quarter of 2021 with back-to-back film releases in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!” The latter has placed him front and center for Oscar contention in the

Costume designer Sharen Davis is having a big year, having worked with both Denzel Washington, who directed “A Journal for Jordan,” now in theaters, and with Will Smith, who stars in “King Richard,” on HBO Max. “A Journal for Jordan,” based on the heartbreaking true story of a soldier deployed to Iraq who keeps a

J.K. Simmons seemed destined to star in an Aaron Sorkin film and he finally does in Amazon Studios’ “Being the Ricardos.” But the two actually crossed paths years earlier. “My first Broadway play, I was an understudy replacement in ‘A Few Good Men,’” Simmons tells Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast. Simmons played the role of the

With “Belle,” anime master Mamoru Hosoda has reimagined “Beauty and the Beast” for the metaverse set — that young generation of social media users who switch identities comfortably between the physical world and a more inviting online one. Roughly half the movie takes place in the “real world” (which is to say, a traditional cartoon

Leonardo DiCaprio is one of Hollywood’s most outspoken environmentalists, and those efforts have now paid off in the form of a recently-discovered tree species being named after him. According to USA Today, Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, London honored DiCaprio this week by giving the Leo tree in Africa’s Cameroon forest the

Peter Bogdanovich was born too late, but also at just the right time. The 82-year-old film critic, historian, advocate and maker, who died Thursday, first blinked his eyes in 1939, the year Alfred Hitchcock moved to Hollywood, Mr. Smith went to Washington and John Ford made “Stagecoach.” He’d surely love to have worked during the

As Brent Lang and Rebecca Rubin aptly pointed out in their Dec. 30 story, the mega-success of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” — with global ticket sales of nearly $1.4 billion to date — reminds us that movie theaters “still create a kind of grand cultural happening that simply can’t be replicated on Netflix.” While that

Sorry, Sidney — Paramount Pictures is not moving forward with a planned red carpet premiere for the latest installment of the “Scream” franchise. Given the tidal wave of the omicron variant, the event originally scheduled for Jan. 11 will not proceed, a note to invited guests said on Thursday. The premiere was expected to convene

“Belfast” stars Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan will be among the awards season frontrunners honored with the Virtuosos Award at the 37th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival. On Thursday, SBIFF organizers announced the 2022 Virtuosos lineup, which boasts “West Side Story” standout Ariana DeBose and “CODA” actors Emilia Jones and Troy Kotsur, plus “Red

We’re in the final days of Screen Actors Guild Awards voting, and the nominating committee members are watching screeners and making their selections of their acting peers. Some films are surging, like Sian Heder’s “CODA” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” which could continue their momentum with nominations for cast ensemble or for their leading

Peter Bogdanovich — whose “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon” solidified his reputation as one of the most important filmmakers in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, but whose personal life threatened to overshadow his career behind the camera — has died, Variety has confirmed. He was 82. Wildly prolific and celebrated early on,

Paris Jackson has a few acting credits under her belt. The 23-year-old daughter of the late Michael Jackson has appeared on television shows “Star,” “Scream: The TV Series” and “American Horror Stories.” On the film side, we’ve seen her in “Gringo” with Charlize Theron as well as indies “The Space Between” and “Habit.” But it’s

Director Alfred Hitchcock age 21. “Rebecca” star Laurence Olivier at 14. “Gone With The Wind” icon Vivien Leigh at 7. Author Roald Dahl age 4 years and nine months. The 1921 census, which was released by the U.K.’s National Archives department on Thursday, provides a snapshot into the lives of some of Britain’s best known

It’s not usually a good idea to grade a movie on the curve of when it’s released. But in the case of “The 355,” one is tempted to make an exception and say: For a first-week-of-January thriller, it isn’t bad. Early January tends to be a dumping ground, because the prestige awards contenders are still

Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model and reality television star who died suddenly in 2007 at the age of 39, will be the subject of a new Netflix documentary. The film, which is still untitled, will include never-before-seen footage from an unreleased documentary about a young Smith balancing motherhood while on the verge of global