Movies

The 74th annual Writers Guild Awards will take place on Sunday, March 20, 2022 — right in the middle of final Oscar voting. The Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), which jointly honor outstanding writing in film, television, new media, news, radio/audio and promotional categories with annual

Terence Davies, that most meticulous of auteurs, returns to the Toronto International Film Festival with “Benediction,” a lush biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, the poet and decorated veteran who became an outspoken critic of World War I. The film should be catnip for Davies admirers. It’s another beautifully composed portrait of genius, repression and loneliness, and

Aardman Animations’ founder Peter Lord will receive the honorary Chinelo del Año at Mexico’s 10th Pixelatl animation festival, hosted by the city of Cuernavaca. Taking place in an online format, the event runs Sept. 7-11. Organization has confirmed the attendance of executives from Disney Animation, Netflix, Nickelodeon, Illumination Entertainment, Lucas Films, Bento Box, Titmouse, HBO

If there’s a film that screened in the mountains at the Telluride Film Festival, and grew legs with attendees, it was Mike Mills’ “C’mon C’mon” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann and Woody Norman. The A24 feature debuted at the famous Chuck Jones theater on the fest’s opening day, which has become a bit of a

Tim Blake Nelson is a highly skilled and versatile actor (not to mention a terrific director), but for years now there has been one character he owns: the yokel, the snaggletoothed redneck runt, the leering hillbilly bumpkin who never met a big vocabulary word he didn’t like to chew on like tobacco. He has done

Wong Kar-Wai has created his first NFT out of never-before-seen footage from his iconic film “In the Mood for Love,” which he will auction off via Sotheby’s in early October. The minute-and-a-half-long short called “In the Mood for Love – Day One” features unseen shots from the film’s first day of production, Sotheby’s said, hailing

If “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper” didn’t already solidify that Kristen Stewart is a gifted actress whose “Twilight” films are in the rear view of her career, here comes “Spencer” from Pablo Larraín. Portraying a fictional version of Princess Diana, Stewart pours all of herself into the role that could yield her first

In advance of the launch of the first trailer for “The Matrix Resurrections” on Thursday, Warner Bros. has launched an innovative website featuring an interactive and widely divergent first look at the newest installment in the 22-year-old franchise. At WhatIsTheMatrix.com, users are greeted with the simple choice first presented in 1999’s “The Matrix”: Click on

In a series of beautiful and devastated frames within frames, Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s “Reflection” sets up a chain of shiveringly precise parallels — or rather, moral mirror-images — between the life and psyche of a civilian and the actions and reactions of that same man in war. A surgeon’s table is swapped for a

Back in 2015, in what already feels like a slightly different era of the Venice Film Festival — currently on a roll of crowning big-name Oscar players — Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas won the Golden Lion for his debut feature “From Afar.” A small, subtle queer relationship study, riddled with ambiguity, it never made quite

Spanish director Juanjo Gimenez’s “Out of Sync” (“Tres”) – his first outing since the Oscar-nominated short “Timecode,” winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or for best short film – came into this year’s Official Selection at the Venice Film Festival buzzing ahead of its world premiere. In the film, sound designer C – played by Marta Nieto,

An animator long showered with awards and critical praise, beginning with his 2004 full-length directorial debut “Mind Game,” Yuasa Masaaki is no stranger to the festival circuit. But Venice, where his new animated feature “Inu-Oh” is screening in the Horizons section, is his first Big Three festival. And his film is the only one from

Variety’s 2021 Power of Women: Los Angeles honorees include Channing Dungey, Amanda Gorman, Lorde, Rita Moreno and Katy Perry. Power of Women: Los Angeles will return as a live event outdoors at the Wallis Annenberg Center on Sept. 30. In partnership with Lifetime, the event will gather the honorees along with other women working in

The ongoing Venice Film Festival has reached the midpoint with more than two-thirds of its pre-pandemic attendance numbers, and not a single attendee testing positive for COVID-19. During a lunch with international press on Tuesday Roberto Cicutto, who is the president of the Biennale that oversees the festival, also announced plans for a revamp of

FESTIVAL The 17th Zurich Film Festival (Sept. 23-Oct. 3) will honor Paul Schrader for his life’s work, which includes the screenplays for Martin Scorsese‘s “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and the films he directed, including “American Gigolo,” “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” “The Comfort of Strangers” and “First Reformed.”

Acclaimed French producer Catherine Dussart has a full production slate including new works from veterans Amos Gitai, Rithy Panh and Peter Greenaway. Dussart is currently at the Venice Film Festival where Indian filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta,” co-produced by her Catherine Dussart Productions, is playing in the Horizons strand. Dussart

The 65 British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival has unveiled its full program and the headline galas include several films that have been gaining fame recently. Among the galas are Pablo Larrain’s “Spencer,” with Kristen Stewart; Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” with Benedict Cumberbatch; Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard,” with Will Smith;

“Woody Allen loves Venice. But Woody Allen’s Venice is not the real Venice. It’s the Las Vegas version of Venice, and it’s not only him,” says Italian director Yuri Ancarani, whose youth drama “Atlantide,” which makes its world premiere in Venice in the Horizons section, might be described as the ultimate Venice landscape film. Think

When producer Robert Lantos began developing the big-budget historical drama series “Rise of the Raven,” adapting Hungarian author Bán Mór’s series of bestselling novels presented obvious challenges. “It’s an 11-volume novel, each volume being 500-600 pages long,” says Lantos. It took several writers and the better part of a decade to find a way forward,

Ana Lily Amirpour doesn’t want you to call her movies “female-led.” It’s true that all of them to date have been centered around strong female protagonists, including her Venice competition title “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” but they’re much more than that, she says. The Iranian-American director recalls early reports describing her next project,

If Jean-Paul Belmondo had gotten his way, he would have been a stage actor. He applied to the Conservatoire de Paris three times before the illustrious drama school accepted him and spent the 1950s trying to launch a theater career. Lucky for world cinema, Belmondo had greater success on screen, thanks to his role in

It’s not often that films shoot in the Occupied Golan Heights, Israel’s contested border territory with Syria and Lebanon. Characterized by sloping mountains and the ruins of more than 100 Syrian villages, destroyed (by Israel) after the Six Day War in 1967, it makes for an atmospheric filming location. This can be seen in “The

Janet Jackson has revealed the first teaser for her two-night documentary, “Janet,” which premieres in January 2022 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the star’s first album. Fellow friends and celebrities such as Paula Abdul and Mariah Carey are shown in the teaser, talking about the connection they have to the star while speaking

The white-hot moment of the Romanian new-wave film renaissance is long in the past. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” came out in 2005, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in 2007. Other landmarks of Romanian cinema also now go back quite a ways, like “Police, Adjective” (2009), “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle”

Audiences on the Lido may be forgiven for thinking they’ve seen the Ukrainian entry in the competition, “Reflection,” before in Venice. Director Valentyn Vasyanovych’s somber study of the toll in the war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine is shot in his trademark series of static, single-frame shots, like “Atlantis” – which won the Venice

From dragon scales to the five elements of Chinese philosophy, production designer Sue Chan worked to incorporate numerous element into the set details of Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” From ancient worlds to San Francisco and a magical village protected by dragons, Chan and her team were faced with the mammoth

“Happening” does not extravagantly announce itself as a period piece, though gradually you figure it out. The young women on whom it’s focused speak in a way that sounds more or less contemporary, if you’re not thinking too hard about it. And if their outfits are a little dated, the film is shot in such

Sony has altered release plans for “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” for the fifth — and hopefully final — time. In a surprise move, the comic book adaptation, starring Tom Hardy as the journalist turned alien symbiote, will debut in theaters earlier than expected on Oct. 1. The “Venom” sequel was scheduled to premiere in

This year’s seventh edition of the Ibero-American Platino Awards (Premios Platinos) will honor Mexican actor, director, producer and festival organizer Diego Luna with the Platino Award of Honor. An itinerant award show by design, this year’s Platinos will be held on Oct. 3 in Madrid. At just 41 years old, Luna will be the youngest

Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani, who is at the Venice Film Festival gap financing market with the documentary “Kabul Melody,” says the lives of more than 150 students of Kabul’s National Institute of Music (ANIM) are at risk after armed Taliban guards shuttered the school and smashed all the musical instruments inside. A few days after