Movies

“The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” nabbed the top spot on box office charts, debuting with $11.6 million from 3,331 U.S. venues over the weekend. The Lionsgate movie, a sequel to the 2017 action comedy “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” opened in theaters on Wednesday and has collected $17 million to date. However, the film cost nearly $70 million

Tribeca Festival, the first in-person film festival in the U.S. since the pandemic, closed out its 20th edition with a tribute to a small town in the midwest. Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, the Oscar winners behind “American Factory,” took the stage at New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall to introduce their new

European film-TV group Studiocanal is teaming with Imperative Entertainment to make psychological thriller “Cat Person,” based on the short story by Kristen Roupenian which was published by The New Yorker in 2017. It went on to become its most downloaded fiction that year. Owned by Vivendi’s Canal PLus Group, and traditionally one of the strongest

Dark comedy film “Manchurian Tiger” won the top prize, the Golden Goblet, Saturday at the 24th edition of the Shanghai International Film Festival. “Manchurian Tiger,” directed by Geng Jun, is the tale of a man who is on the run from debt collectors and manages to embroil family and friends in his misadventures. Films that

While the famous opening text in “Fargo” states that the story of the film was based on true events, it turns out that the Coen brothers only included this fraudulent message to subvert the audience’s expectations. “It occurred to us that if an audience thinks that the template that you’re following are actual events, they

When Chaz Ebert decided to have Black Writers Week on RogerEbert.com, she chose mid-June dates to coincide with the same week as Juneteenth. Upon this decision, she had no idea Juneteenth was to become a federally recognized holiday. “I’m really filled with emotion today because of it being the first federally-recognized Juneteenth Independence Day. The

On Saturday evening, after a week of onsite and virtual screenings, conferences, masterclasses and panels, the Annecy Animation Festival announced the winners of its major prizes, joining the already announced Special Prizes from the night before. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s “Flee” continued its winning form from the previous evening – it won best original music from

French public broadcaster France Televisions confirmed its status as one of Europe’s biggest financiers of animation during the Annecy Festival where it unveiled its wide-ranging slate during a press conference. In 2020, which was marked by the pandemic and two lockdowns, the broadcaster invested €32 million ($38.4 million) in the production of French animated content,

If no distributor can ever handpick its audience, once Netflix sent its ribald and irreverent reframing of the U.S.’ foundational myth to the French animation festival, the streamer certainly came awfully close. Produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and directed by “Archer” producer Matt Thompson, the decidedly hard-R “America: The Motion Picture” played to

Jacob Tremblay stars as “Luca” in Pixar’s new animated feature. The coming-of-age film follows two young sea creatures and best friends who embark on a summer adventure when they explore the Italian Riviera. Tremblay recently spoke with Variety about recording his part at Pixar’s studios in Emeryville, the message of the film and how director Enrico

I’m a critic, but that doesn’t mean I reflexively come at things from a negative angle. I like to accentuate the positive, to see the part of the glass that’s full. So when it was announced, on June 17, that Peter Jackson’s long-awaited, long-delayed Beatles documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back,” would no longer be a

French arthouse shingle Autour de Minuit, which produced the Academy Award-winning animated short “Logorama,” has released the first teaser for Nadia Micault’s “Shadows,” awarded as a project with the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award at Cartoon Movie last March. Autour de Minuit is joined in co-production by Belgium’s Panique on what will be Micault’s first feature

For Don Cheadle and several of the cast members of “No Sudden Move,” the heist movie’s Tribeca Festival premiere was one of the first in-person events they’ve attended since the pandemic began. “I’m looking forward to the movie, it’s gonna be a crazy experience,” Cheadle told Variety at the film’s Friday night premiere. “I haven’t been

Lionsgate’s “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is heading toward a $10 million weekend debut at the domestic box office, with an expected gross of $15 million in its first five days in release. The sequel to 2017’s “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” which opened on Wednesday, took in $3 million from 3,331 locations on Friday. This puts the

Ugo Bienvenu (aka Ugo), the popular French illustrator and comics author of “Préférence système,” is partnering up with veteran producer Valerie Schermann (“The Red Turtle,” “Paris, 13th District”) on his animated feature debut “Arco.” An ambitious science-fiction film, “Arco” is being co-developed and co-produced by Remembers, the outfit launched by Bienvenu and Félix de Givry,

Conceived in 2019 and fielding its first call for projects at last year’s edition, Annecy’s Festival Residency program bore fruit this year, shepherding three projects to pitch sessions at the festival’s MIFA market. They benefitted from nearly six months of professional mentorship and institutional support. “For some time, festival director Mickaël Marin and I wanted

The director of the Quirino Awards-nominated “Cranston Academy: Monster Zone,” Mexico’s Leopoldo Aguilar, will direct “Bem & I.” It will be produced by Mexico’s Espíritu Santo Cine and Pēek Paax animation studio, both of whom backed this year’s Quirino best feature winner, “A Costume for Nicholas.” Mexico’s Espíritu Santo is a recently-founded company devoted to

On Friday, the team at BreakThru Films behind “The Peasants” – producer Sean Bobbitt, filmmaker Dorota Kobiela and writer-producer Hugh Welchman – took the stage at an Annecy Work in Progress screening to reveal to the world just what they’ve been working on since turning an experimental hand-painted biopic, 2017’s “Loving Vincent,” into one of

Speaking before a rapt audience at the Annecy Film Festival on Friday, director Pierre Földes, producers Tanguy Olivier and Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, and artists from France’s Miyu Productions premiered work in progress footage from Földes’ “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” a 2D animated adaptation of a handful of Haruki Murakami stories that looks to translate the Japanese

“She was the air I breathed.” Emmy Award winning animator Joe Mateo takes that heartfelt concept and in “Blush,” his directorial debut, delivers what must rate as one of the most personal yet still resonant films at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival. The inaugural short from Apple Original Films and David Ellison’s Skydance Animation, bowing

A moody, clenched drama that works its tension so deep you may find your palms marked with the indentations of your fingernails by the end, “Les Nôtres” is the deeply uneasy but compelling second film from director Jeanne Leblanc (“Isla Blanca”). Illuminated by a powerfully self-possessed performance by Émilie Bierre as the 13-year-old whose pregnancy

Keith Redmon is out after nearly two decades at Anonymous Content, Variety has learned. The manager and producer was a prominent figure at the company, where he was a partner and produced “The Revenant,” a 2015 survival drama that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and grossed $533 million at the global box office. The movie also earned

Steven Soderbergh is a fantastically eclectic filmmaker (you never know where he’s going to go next), but if you look back over his roughly 30 dramatic features it’s telling to consider how many of them are some variety of tricky old-school thriller or film noir powered by suspenseful screw-tightening. I’m talking about the “Ocean’s” trilogy,

Taylour Paige was not familiar with A’Ziah “Zola” King when she auditioned to play her in “Zola,” the film based on King’s October 2015 viral Twitter thread, but she has since corresponded with her on social media. The thread (and film) tells the tale of a crazy weekend during which Zola, an exotic dancer, embarks

The fourth and final installment in the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise, “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” will now debut during a far spookier month. Previously dated for July 23, the Sony Pictures Animation film will now release on Oct. 1, kicking off the Halloween season. The movie will see Drac (Brian Hull) and the rest of the monsters

Pacific Theatres, which includes ArcLight Cinemas, announced Friday that it will liquidate its assets under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, ending the company’s 75-year run in the exhibition business. But the bankruptcy filing also held a strong hint that one piece of the Forman family’s theater empire will live on. The Decurion Corporation —

Michael Brown Sr., father of Michael Brown, who was killed in Ferguson, Mo. by a police officer at age 18, has appeared in his fair share of documentaries and recorded countless interviews since his son’s death in 2014. But there was something about “Ferguson Rises,” filmmaker Mobolaji Olambiwonnu’s take on the Brown family’s story, that

Over the course of just three features, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland has already made a stamp on that documentary subgenre culture hounds find most irresistible — the 20th-century personality portrait — taking names we know well (Diana Vreeland, Peggy Guggenheim and Cecil Beaton) and sharing the private realms of their creative worlds. With “Truman &

Pixar’s “Luca,” now streaming on Disney Plus, is the story of two teenage boys having a carefree summer at the Italian seaside — but they just happen to be sea monsters. Speaking with Variety, production designer Daniela Strijleva teased that the animated feature, in true Pixar style, is filled with Easter eggs galore. Sharp-eyed audiences should look

The sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, closed to the public under the evening midtown sky in New York City, was witness to the first glimmers of a chic summer return for the art world on Thursday. For the first time since the pandemic, MoMA held its first in-person event, a private evening