Movies

Romantic frontier drama “The World to Come” opens the June instalment of International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021 and its director, New York and Oslo based writer-director Mona Fastvold is also set to give one of three Big Talks at the festival this week. Since the director’s second feature made its debut last September at the

Perhaps it’s time for another meeting between officials from Israel and Palestine like the series of off-the-books negotiations that took place in Oslo, Norway, back in 1993. Those sessions — conducted in secret over nearly six months, since Israeli policy forbade interacting with or otherwise acknowledging the authority of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — paid

Gavin MacLeod, a sitcom veteran who played seaman “Happy” Haines on “McHale’s Navy,” Murray on “Mary Tyler Moore” and the very different, vaguely patrician Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat,” has died. He was 90. MacLeod’s nephew, Mark See, confirmed his death to Variety. MacLeod died in the early morning on May 29. No cause

Eduardo Rivero’s debut feature “A Costume for Nicholas,” Bernardita Ojeda’s “Petit Season Two” and Alberto Vázquez’s “Homeless Home” won big at Saturday’s 4th Quirino Awards, which prize animated films and series from Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Winners picked up their plaudits at a on-site ceremony held at La Laguna in Spain’s Canary islands.“A Costume

Marilyn Monroe would have turned 95 on June 1. What would she think of her 26-foot-tall image greeting visitors to the Palm Springs Art Museum with her skirt permanently blown up by a sidewalk air vent, exposing her underwear in an undeniably iconic yet rather suggestive pose? A number of residents in Palm Springs think

Spain’s Lightbox Entertainment, producer of the smash hit “Tadeo Jones” toon movie franchise, is teaming with Portugal’s Sardinha em Lata, Brazil’s Gepetto Filmes and Spain’s Xose Zapata to make “Alice’s Diary,” a 52-episode animated series for toddlers. “Alice’s Diary” is also backed by Portuguese pubcaster RTP and its Spanish counterpart, TVE. Sardinha em Lata is

The 20th century is likely unique in laying claim to three sociopathic dictators whose complete disregard for humanity in either the individual or the collective has justifiably earned them the label “monsters.” Hitler, Mao and Stalin shredded utopian notions of moral progress, their crimes exposing the inadequacy of language to convey the scale of their

“Cruella” production designer Fiona Crombie worked on more than 100 sets to create the multi-layered vintage look of 1970s London, giving lots of thought to young Cruella’s den. Crombie looked at old photos of abandoned locks that ran along the Thames River in London for her main inspiration for young Estella’s/Cruella’s (Emma Stone) home and

When director David Leitch and Brad Pitt told Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group President Sanford Panitch that they were keen to cast Aaron Taylor-Johnson for the ensemble thriller “Bullet Train,” Panitch wasn’t super-aware of the British actor. “It was a ‘I had to look him up’ kind of thing,” Panitch tells Variety. “I didn’t have

Movie theater chains, including AMC, Regal and Cinemark, will no longer require fully vaccinated guests to wear face masks. In line with CDC guidelines, masks will be optional for inoculated patrons and will be “strongly encouraged” for all others. For non-vaccinated customers, masks can be removed when eating and drinking inside the auditorium. All employees

Disney’s new “Cruella” tells the origin story of the iconic villain Cruella de Vil. Emma Stone stars as the titular character with Emma Thompson playing her nemesis, fashion designer Baroness von Hellman. Variety’s senior culture and events editor Marc Malkin asked the cast of the film which other Disney villains they think should get a big-screen

In world cinema, austerity isn’t just a quality — it’s an aesthetic ideal that gets passed around from country to country. The epicenter of high cinematic austerity was once the Sweden of Ingmar Bergman. Then it was the Czechoslovakia of the pre-Communist new wave, then the Germany of Fassbinder, then the Iran of Kiarostami, then

The only thing editor Tatiana S. Riegel will spill on Hulu’s limited series “Pam and Tommy” is the tease, “It’s going to be good. It’s outrageous. There’s Disney,” she says referring to her latest project “Cruella” (in theaters and streaming on Disney Plus Premier Access). “Then there’s ‘Pam and Tommy,’ It’s a big difference,” she

Jerome Hellman, the producer behind “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home,” died on Wednesday, his wife Elizabeth Empleton Hellman confirmed. He was 92. His work on landmark films helped define the new Hollywood of the 1970s. From 1964 to 1986, Hellman collaborated with notable directors including John Schlesinger on “The Day of the Locust” and “Midnight

Time to fire up the private jets and saturate Burbank’s airport with chauffeured Suburbans — all the major studios are headed back to CinemaCon. The annual convention of movie theater owners has committed all the major players and notable mid-sized film operations to present at the annual Las Vegas gathering — a delightful mix of

Ahead of the long Memorial Day weekend, Paramount’s “A Quiet Place Part II” and Disney’s “Cruella” are each off to a solid start at the domestic box office. The former, a nearly silent sequel to the 2018 film “A Quiet Place,” nabbed a notable $4.8 million from 3,000 U.S. venues on Thursday. Meanwhile, Disney’s “Cruella”

Millicent Simmonds is at the forefront of a cultural movement to hire more actors with disabilities. The young performer knew she wanted to pursue an acting career after working with director Todd Haynes in “Wonderstruck” in 2017, and thanks to director John Krasinski, the deaf actor scored her breakout role as Regan Abbott in “A

Philadelphia-based Breaking Glass Pictures (BGP) and Brazil’s O2 Play, the distribution arm of O2 Filmes, which is co-owned by Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God,” “The Constant Gardener,” “The Two Popes”), have inked a two-way distribution partnership. The new pact kicks off with BGP’s North American release of a Brazilian drama by Eliane Coster,

In today’s Global Bulletin, BGM shakes up its executive teams in Canada; COVID postpones Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards; and India’s music industry teams for an online concert to raise funds for COVID relief. HIRING Canada’s BGM Inc, a Sphere Media group company, has hired production executive Andrea Griffiths to the newly created role of director

“Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino has begun principal photography on his first film set in America, “Bones and All,” starring Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance. The project, which is filming on location in the Ohio Tri-State area, marks the first collaboration between Guadagnino and Chalamet since the Oscar-nominated “Call Me By

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival will be heading to the Croisette for the first time to take part in the annual Goes to Cannes event, the Cannes Film Market’s pix-in-post industry showcase. Variety can reveal the five films that are slated to take part. “We’re very excited to bring our wolf pack to Cannes

Altitude has acquired U.K. distribution rights to “Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds,” a 3D animated feature inspired by Alexandre Dumas’ 19th-century classic D’Artagnan novels. The family adventure film is being represented in international markets by Charades, the sales banner behind the Oscar-nominated “Mirai” and “I Lost My Body.” Budgeted in the range of $10 million,

Sony Pictures Entertainment intends to play the film and TV industry’s new era as an independent studio, committed to theatrical releasing, and with an expanded slate that gives it more options in streaming, says its chairman and CEO, Tony Vinciquerra. Speaking Thursday at parent company Sony Group’s investor relations day, Vinciquerra said that as parts

Hong Kong film censors issued a warning to the city’s hospital workers union on Thursday evening over the screening two films related to the 1989 June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown. “I Have Graduated” is a 1992 documentary about the last batch of university students who experienced the 1989 Beijing protests, and was produced by a

November 1901. Mexico City. A police raid on a high-society private party leads to the arrest of 42 men. Nineteen are found wearing lavish ball gowns that matched the opulence of the (very much illicit) affair. Among those arrested are key figures from Mexico’s ruling class, including one whose name and presence at the party

For the inaugural season of Disney’s “Launchpad” shorts incubator, the studio centered on the theme, “Discover,” encouraging audiences broaden their worldview through their short films. But another word that could describe this first group of films and the filmmakers who crafted them over the last 19 months is “Perseverance.” When Aqsa Altaf, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Ann Marie

The other family-imperiled-by-rampaging-beasts movie this weekend, “Endangered Species” is different from “A Quiet Place Part II” in many ways, particularly in that its characters cannot stop yakking — with corresponding diminished viewer concern for their survival under extreme duress. MJ Bassett’s South African-produced thriller has a vacationing American clan doing all the wrong things in

In 1981’s “Lili Marleen,” directed by German provocateur R.W. Fassbinder, the titular song is repeatedly played to an imprisoned man in an effort to break his spirit. In “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” it takes only one rendition to have much the same effect on the viewer, though that may be because by

The 2019 Indian Film Festival Los Angeles concluded on May 27 with the grand prize going to Thamizh’s directorial debut “Seththumaan” (Pig) and Karishma Dev Dube’s short “Bittu.” “It’s a phenomenal first feature, gentle and impactful, done with heart and guts, that is at the same time very candid and very mature and complex,” the

In a perfect symbol of our times, James Bond and Whole Foods will soon have the same owner. Tech giant Amazon on Wednesday officially announced plans to merge with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the 97-year-old studio that’s home to the 007 franchise, Rocky Balboa and “Thelma and Louise.” The eye-popping $8.45 billion sale is the second-biggest acquisition in