Movies

Some subscribers to HBO Max got an unexpected preview of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” on Monday when the four-hour superhero movie started playing instead of the Warner Bros. film “Tom and Jerry.” Doug Bass, a realtor and digital marketing analyst based in Charlotte, N.C., tells Variety he was “just looking for some background TV while

Five competitive local titles have announced as of Monday that they will be vying for box office supremacy in China over the May 1 Labor Day weekend, a public holiday. They include a long-anticipated video game adaptation, an omnibus pandemic film helmed by three different female big shots from China, Hong Kong and the U.S.,

Filmmakers Max Lang and Daniel Snaddon are no strangers to the world of adapting the vividly illustrated children’s books of Julia Donaldson for animation. They’ve adapted “Room on the Broom,” “The Gruffalo” and “Stick Man,” and this time they’re vying for Oscar short animated film and Annie Awards consideration with another beloved story, “The Snail

David France’s “Welcome to Chechnya” could very well make Oscar history as the first documentary to be nominated for Best Visual Effects. The documentary details the brutality the LGBTQ community faces in Chechnya at the hands of the government. France goes inside the shocking and horrific genocide that Chechnyan leader Ramzan Kadyrov is unleashing on

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has announced details regarding its opening gala, which will be held on Sept. 25. The event will commence a week of celebrations leading up to the Los Angeles museum’s opening to the public on Sept. 30. Ava DuVernay, Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum will serve as co-chairs at the

Nick Robinson, the wholesome, all-American-seeming star of “Love, Simon” and “Jurassic World,” plays an unlikely drug trafficker in “Silk Road.” The film tells the true story of Ross Ulbricht’s unlikely rise to fortune and infamy as the founder a dark web market. Dubbed the Silk Road, Ulbricht’s creation gave users the ability to buy everything

Fresh off her stint playing Diana, Princess of Wales, in Netflix’s period drama “The Crown,” Emma Corrin is gearing up to portray another high-society woman. The actor in talks to star in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” a romance drama about the scandalous affair between star-crossed lovers. Based on D.H. Lawrence’s novel, the story follows the wealthy

“The White Tiger” actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas talks to director Karishma Dev Dube and the young stars of “Bittu,” which is shortlisted in the live action short film category at the 2021 Oscars. “Bittu” is the story of a close friendship between two girls (played by Rani Kumari and Renu Kumari) in northern India that

TV France International, the French TV promotion organisation, is launching the first edition of Rendez-Vous DOCS, a series of online pitching dedicated to documentaries. Aimed at 124 buyers across 38 countries, the sessions will highlight 18 projects and each program will be pitched by producers/and or sales agents and filmmakers at a Paris venue called

MTV Documentary Films has acquired North American rights to “Sabaya,” the story of volunteers of the Yazidi Home Center, who risk their lives in order to save women and girls held by ISIS as sex slaves. The film received a directing award for world cinema documentary when it premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“The Queen’s Gambit,” the story of a chess prodigy that was a streaming smash for Netflix, may become a musical. Level Forward, has acquired the theatrical stage rights to Walter Tevis’ novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” which served as the basis for the miniseries. Tevis also wrote “The Hustler” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth,”

In a year of quarantine isolation and global tumult, storytelling has never felt more necessary as a portal to the world. To mark International Women’s Day, Variety offers a guide to female-centered stories that will reach big and small screens this year and at the creators behind them. Take Malala Yousafzai, the trailblazing 23-year-old women’s

I was born in 1934, raised by a single mother who had my sister and me out of wedlock. My father was nowhere to be found. We lived in a tiny house with my grandmother, mother, and uncles. Growing up in war-torn Italy, it wasn’t so much the bombings, the hunger or the general sense

Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa one said that in Latin America, poverty, injustice and other social problems are too prominent to be ignored. So, the question: Can cinema change the world? has a special importance. “It obsesses me,” Chilean director Pablo Larrain told Variety a few weeks back. “I have been around many U.S.

Breathing in its deadly gases, Yono works for a few dollars a day at an East Java sulfur mine. When unexpectedly abandoned by his wife, he turns to animism, Islamism and finally capitalism­­ to try to find an answer to life. To no avail. Barcelona-born Alvaro Gurrea is a singular figure in Spanish cinema, an

A group of top British talent agents are convening to create a working group tackling issues of race faced by actors of color in the U.K. The collective of agents are part of the Personal Managers’ Association (PMA), an organization comprised of 180 member agencies, including Curtis Brown, 42 Management and Identity Agency Group —

A notable launch for “Minari” lifted the South Korea box office to its second highest weekend of 2021. The Korean-language American-made drama performed 80% higher than the weekend’s other significant new release Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon.” Opening in first place, “Minari” clocked up $1.68 million over the weekend, according to data from the

The stymied popular uprising in Belarus that began in August 2020 is yet to completely play out, but it’s important to have Aliaksei Paluyan’s polished on-the-ground documentary now as a record of what happened last summer. “Courage” follows three members of the underground Belarus Free Theater as they participate in the resistance to Alexander Lukashenko’s

As New York City cinemas scrambled to reopen across the country, Amazon Prime worked to build buzz in the lead up to “Coming 2 America’s” March 5 release. Initially scheduled to be theatrically released by Paramount Pictures on Aug. 7, 2020, the highly anticipated sequel to the 1988 classic was pushed back to Dec. 18,

Despite its emphasis on Asian representation and Southeast Asian themes, Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon” failed to soar in China, coming in third with just $8.4 million, according to Maoyan data. While the sum might look respectable in other pandemic-stricken locales, it falls short in China’s recovered movie market, which has set box office

One of Europe’s first 2021 on-site festivals, held at Guía de Isora on the west coast of Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands, top Spanish doc festival MiradasDoc awarded its best film prize on Saturday to Argentina’s “Shady River,” directed and lensed by Tatiana Mazú González. The 14th MiradasDoc’s festival awards were unveiled Saturday as its

Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” swept the Latino Entertainment Film Awards on Sunday, taking home four awards, including best picture, director, cinematography and editing. The awards, which are voted on and presented by the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association, also honored Oscar-nominated actor Rosie Perez with the Rita Moreno Lifetime Achievement Award and the Latino Activism Award. In

With Oscar voting officially underway, members of the Academy are hunkering down and catching up on all the films from this year of extended eligibility. Inarguably the hardest awards season to read in modern history, there are dozens of interpretations of how the season will shake out and where AMPAS voters’ minds are within the

New York City movie theaters welcomed back customers for the first time in nearly a year this weekend. And yet some high profile new releases still struggled to sell tickets, a sign that a box office revival may not be in the cards for a few months. Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon,” a computer-animated

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association issued a statement on Instagram Saturday evening, promising “transformational change” after coming under fire in recent weeks for a lack of diversity in the organization and for ethical issues surrounding the Golden Globes. The Instagram post detailed that the organizations would be hiring an independent diversity and equity expert who

Pilar Palomero’s “The Girls,” a coming-of-age story and generational portrait of Spanish women who would now be in their 40s, swept an extraordinary 35th edition of Spain’s Goya Awards on Saturday, scooping best picture, new director, original screenplay and cinematography. Salvador Calvo won best director for the three-part, Africa-set drama “Adú,” a Netflix pick-up produced

“Nomadland” production sound mixer Michael Wolf Snyder has died by suicide, according his father, David Snyder. He was 35. Snyder’s body was found in his Queens, N.Y. apartment by his father on March 1 after friends and family had not heard from him for several days. David, a psychiatrist, posted a message on Facebook on

In the late ’90s, when Jim Carrey did his pivot away from rubber-faced anarchy to became a serious actor, the detour didn’t last all that long, but he gave three stupendous performances (“The Truman Show,” “Man on the Moon,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), and one of the things that made them great is

“Crazy Rich Asians” screenwriter Adele Lim never thought in her wildest dreams that she would be part of a Disney animated feature, let alone one that is set in Southeast Asia. But Disney’s newest tale, “Raya and the Last Dragon” (now streaming on Disney Plus), delivers its first Southeast Asian princess, Raya, a warrior who

For New York City residents Marina Thomas and Brandt Kempin, going to the movies carries near spiritual significance. “It’s a version of church,” Kempin says. The couple returned to their sacred space, IFC Center in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, on Friday to see “Another Round,” a drama about hard-living teachers starring Mads Mikkelsen. They arrived early