Movies

“My Brilliant Friend” star Margherita Mazzucco is set to play Saint Clare of Assisi in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s new feature film “Chiara” which will conclude the director’s trilogy of female biopics also comprising “Nico, 1988” and “Miss Marx.” Nicchiarelli’s portrait of the 13th century saint born into a wealthy family who at age 18 became a nun

Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival has revealed to Variety the projects that the participants of its 2021 Emerging Producers program are working on. The producers were asked to deliver an Elevator Pitch for their projects. Every year since 2010, the festival has selected 18 up-and-coming producers of documentary films (17 European and one representing a

Sometimes having good intentions and eye-witness testimony is not enough to make a topical, issues-driven movie connect with its anticipated audience. The movie “Dea,” recently boarded by Hong Kong sales company Good Move Media, is a case in point. It probes the put-upon lives of foreign domestic helpers, who number several hundred thousand in Hong

Sales and production company Film Constellation has secured further pre-sales on upcoming English-language horror “The Twin,” starring Teresa Palmer and directed by Taneli Mustonen (“Lake Bodom”), with BF Distribution boarding the film in Latin America and Studio DHL in South Korea. Film Constellation has also revealed the art for the film’s poster (see below). Palmer

Filmmaker/producer Steven Soderbergh is on board to executive produce a feature-length adaptation of buzzy Directors’ Fortnight short film “The Vandal,” Variety can reveal. Directed by American helmer Eddie Alcazar, the Quinzaine-premiering film — which is presented by filmmaker/producer Darren Aronofsky — is being tipped as an early contender for the best animated short Oscar. It

Not to be outdone by Matt Damon, Sean Penn looked like he was about to cry at the Saturday night premiere of “Flag Day.” The drama earned a four-minute standing ovation broken up by remarks from Penn, praising his daughter, Dylan Frances Penn, for her debut lead role in a movie. Penn takes on double

As a filmmaker, Sean Penn has always had a flinty integrity, but the movies he directs work so hard to channel the values of ’70s films — they’re moody and fatalistic, with furrowed brows, and move at a pace of drop-dead deliberation — that early on, in the days of “The Indian Runner” (1991) and

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson transported audiences back to the late 1960s with a special screening of his new documentary, “Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised),” at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday night. In its first two weeks in theaters, the musical movie about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival

Having been forced to cancel last year’s Cannes due to the pandemic, 2021 is proving to be a happy nude year for the festival with this edition’s most talked-about film, “Benedetta,” featuring a pair of romping nuns. Even the outwardly gentle period drama “Mothering Sunday” is unabashed about displaying the human body in all its

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read if you have not seen “Black Widow,” currently in theaters and available on Premium Access on Disney Plus. For most of her interview with Variety, Cate Shortland was an open book: Candid and funny and thrilled to get to talk about her experience directing Marvel Studios’ “Black Widow.” That is, until she was asked about the film’s post-credits

Bo Burnham is giving you a reason to go outside. On July 22, the comedian’s latest Netflix special, “Inside,” will hit theaters nationwide for one night only. It first premiered on the streamer on May 30. “Come on out,” Burnham invited fans via Twitter. come on out. july 22nd. https://t.co/YankW6ZJN9 pic.twitter.com/gnDi6JTgTA — Bo Burnham (@boburnham)

Chilean director Domingo Sotomayor (“Too Late to Die Young,” “Thursday Till Sunday”) is re-teaming with Sao Paulo-based RT Features (“Call Me by Your Name,” “The Lighthouse”) to make her third feature, “Niebla.” CAA Media Finance arranged the financing and will represent sales rights. The cruise ship-set drama is currently in development and set to shoot

Cohen Media Group and Curzon have jointly acquired all U.S. and U.K. distribution rights to “Everything Went Fine,” Francois Ozon’s film with Sophie Marceau, which just world-premiered in competition at Cannes and earned a warm critical welcome. The deal was negotiated by CMG senior VP Robert Aaronson, Curzon Artificial Eye’s managing director Louisa Dent and

Costume designer Jany Temime says working on Marvel’s “Black Widow” was a dream job. She doesn’t know the exact number of costumes she created, but it was “a lot.” The costume designer who counts “Judy,” “Skyfall” and three of the Harry Potter films including “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I and II” among

For anyone who’s ever got drunk on bad schnapps with a stranger, for anyone who’s ever been properly alone in a nowhere-town and spoken to a dial tone just to look like they had something to do, for anyone who’s ever been asked how to say “I love you” in their language and has patiently

Marvel’s “Black Widow” is already crushing pandemic-era box office records. The superhero adventure raked in a mighty $39.5 million from 4,160 theaters on Friday, the biggest single-day gross since the onset of COVID-19. Through the weekend, “Black Widow” is poised to generated a huge $87.8 million, which would best the benchmark previously set by “F9”

The Netherlands and South Africa launched a new co-development fund July 10 in Cannes. The two counties signed a co-production treaty in 2015, and are looking to build on that through stronger collaboration. The SA-NL Thuthuka Fund will provide selective script and co-development support for feature film and documentary projects with South African- and Dutch-related

Telefilm Canada and Screen Ireland have boarded “Cry From the Sea,” a co-production between Canada’s Sepia Films and Ireland’s ShinAwil, which has been greenlit to shoot in the Fall. To be directed by Vic Sarin (“Partition,” “A Shine of Rainbows”), the romantic drama centers on Edith, an enigmatic American widow who visits an Irish island

Indian filmmaker Rahul Jain followed up his debut doc, “Machines,” with “Invisible Demons,” about the pollution in New Delhi. The film, which will play in Cannes’ inaugural Cinema for the Climate, will be represented for international sales by Participant and MK2 Films. Jain was in the German countryside trying to find “inspiration in nature” when

A host of anticipated upcoming titles from the growing Polish industry have hit the Cannes Film Market. FoolsDirector: Tomasz WasilewskiProducer: Ewa Puszczyńska (Extreme Emotions)Logline: Marlena (62) and Tomasz (42), hidden away from the world in a small seaside town, have been in a happy relationship for many years. Their intricately woven everyday life slowly begins

When she was a student at the prestigious Lodz Film School in Poland, Jagoda Szelc was offered the chance to shoot a feature film. It was an unexpected opportunity for the aspiring filmmaker, who was then in her third year. But after it was produced on a shoestring budget, “Tower. A Bright Day” would go

The Cannes Film Festival has become a little less stressful for those who are fully vaccinated. New sanitary passes are slowly being introduced that effectively remove the need to take a salivary RT-PCR test every two days. The purple-bordered passes are available to those who are fully vaccinated (meaning it must be two weeks since

“Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven slammed the new “puritanism” he perceives has taken over cinema during a charged Cannes press conference for his latest film “Benedetta,” saying critics “don’t want to look at the reality of life.” The Belgian auteur has received a generally positive response to his risqué new film, which stars Virginie Efira

Les Films Pelleas, the Paris-based production banner behind Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anais in Love” at Cannes’ Critics Week, is powering a female-driven slate with new projects by Justine Trier (“Sibyl”), Katell Quillévéré (“Heal the Living”) and Danielle Arbid (“Suzanne et Osmane”). “Anatomie d’une chute” marks Triet’s follow up to “Sibyl,” which competed at Cannes in 2019.

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s new opus “Drive My Car,” one of just two Asian titles competing for the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival, consists of three melancholy hours of conversations, but it says the most in its moments of silence. In an interview ahead of the film’s debut on the Croisette, Hamaguchi notes

Josh Duhamel (pictured above), Mel Gibson, Elisha Cuthbert and Nestor Carbonell star in “Bandit,” which Highland Film Group is selling at Cannes.  Allan Ungar directs. Kraig Wenman wrote the script based on author Robert Knuckle’s best-selling novel and journalist Ed Arnold’s interviews with Gilbert Galvan Jr., who lived under the name Robert Whiteman when he

Most U.K. sales agents sent slimmed-down teams — or none at all — to Cannes this year, but Rocket Science CEO Thorsten Schumacher had no qualms about getting back to business as usual on the Croisette. Rocket Science has two films in the festival: Sean Penn-directed competition title “Flag Day” and Eva Husson’s “Mothering Sunday,”

The U.K.’s Broken Flames Prods. has entered into a partnership with producer Lucas A. Ferrara to form a new film fund for writers, it was revealed at Cannes on Friday. The fund will provide an opportunity for emerging writers to get their projects financed and produced, with the winner also receiving a monetary stipend. Writers

Madrid-based Latido Films has sold a slew of major territories on its banner titles, including Cannes Directors’ Fortnight player “The Employer and the Employee,” Berlin winner “The Fam,” village crime drama “The Replacement” and auteur genre movie “Baby.” Chalking up its first major sale, Uruguayan Manuel Nieto’s “The Employer and the Employee” has closed France

“Nocturna,” an Argentinian-made fantasy film that played last month in the Shanghai International Film Festival’s midnight fantasy section, has been picked up by Chinese company Naropean. Naropean, which shares executives with HGC Entertainment, one of the more prominent Chinese IP groups, has taken rights for China, Asia and Oceania, as well as remake rights. The