Movies

When cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (“12 Years a Slave”) was shooting Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah,” he looked at more than 300 photos from the period and watched documentaries of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton speaking to crowds to see how Hampton was framed. “There were several references that Shaka had shown me, including

Live from New York or Beverly Hills, it’s the 78th Golden Globe Awards. While the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC announced earlier this month that the Globes would be broadcast live from both costs, with Tina Fey from New York’s Rainbow Room (at the top of Rockefeller Center) and Amy Poehler at the Beverly

A peculiar thing happened after “Bridesmaids” premiered a decade ago and became an undeniable box office smash. Hot takes popped up around every corner of the internet and across the pages of newspapers and magazines, offering up one astute observation: Women can be funny! It was especially confusing for Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who

More than just about any existing film festival, Slamdance was started with an eye toward inclusion. In the case of the Park City festival, which was founded as a more freewheeling alternative to Sundance back in 1995, that sense of inclusion largely pertained to the filmmakers themselves: first-timers, experimentalists and enterprising directors without much in

Less than two days after Gina Carano was fired by Lucasfilm over “abhorrent” social media posts, Ben Shapiro, the conservative political commentator and co-founder of The Daily Wire, has pledged to make a movie with her. “Hollywood cancelled Gina Carano for being conservative. That’s bullshit. So we’re fighting back,” Shapiro tweeted on Friday. “Become a

Awards season contender “News of the World” is a departure for director Paul Greengrass after such high-adrenaline contempo movies as his Jason Bourne trio and “22 July.” He reunites with “Captain Phillips” star Tom Hanks in Universal’s Western about Captain Kidd, a man delivering the news to towns in Texas, accompanied by the orphan Johanna.

Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, may have met her onscreen match. Zawe Ashton has been cast in “Captain Marvel 2” and will go toe-to-toe with Larson as the sequel’s antagonist. Nia DaCosta is directing the film, a follow-up to 2019’s blockbuster “Captain Marvel.” Megan McDonnell, a story editor on the Disney Plus series

A quick glance at its supporting cast — a lineup that includes such notables as Mickey Rourke, Lou Diamond Phillips, Penelope Ann Miller and Sean Astin — might lead you to suspect “Adverse” has only recently been retrieved from a time capsule originally sealed in the mid-to-late 1990s. And, indeed, if it weren’t for the

“My Little Pony,” an animated movie aimed at family audiences, is heading to Netflix. Paramount Pictures was originally set to distribute the film, which had been scheduled to open in theaters on Sept. 24, 2021. Hasbro’s entertainment studio Entertainment One produced the movie and will retain distribution rights in China. Though the exact release date is

“Am I crazy or is this really happening?” is by now a fairly familiar hook for thrillers. But Castille Landon’s “Fear of Rain” gets some fresh mileage from it by embedding us in the perspective of a teenager diagnosed with schizophrenia — and whose worries are thus dismissed as delusional when she decides a next-door

Vue International boss Tim Richards is stepping in as chair of the British Film Institute (BFI) at one of the most pivotal moments in the org’s history. The U.K. industry has weathered close to a year of the coronavirus pandemic and three national lockdowns, the most recent of which is still in place. While film

Paris-based Totem Films announced Friday that it is handling sales on Iranian Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam’s Berlin Film Festival competition entry, “Ballad of a White Cow.” Totem Films will bring the drama onto the market at early March’s European Film Market (EFM). The pick-up is sure to draw attention. Launched in 2019 by Agathe

“Downton Abbey” star Hugh Bonneville has teased a sequel to the hit 2019 film adaptation. Speaking on BBC Radio 2’s “The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show” on Friday, Bonneville said: “Here’s the deal, if everybody who is offered a vaccine takes a vaccine, we can make a movie, we will make a movie.” The actor, who

“All Eyes Off Me,” Hadas Ben Aroya’s drama which will world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, has been acquired by Brussels-based company Best Friend Forever for international sales. Set to bow in the Panorama section, “All Eyes Off Me” takes place in contemporary Tel Aviv and weaves three stories portraying Tel Aviv’s youth. The

Rites of passage, teenage girls in small towns, strict and uncomprehending parents: We know the drill, yet few films riffing on the subject get the mood and ambiguities as right as “Looking for Venera.” Debuting feature director Norika Sefa exhibits exceptional talent in bringing subtlety and depth to characters as well as the overall atmosphere

Dimitri Rassam is joining forces with Pathé on a €60 million ($73 million) two-part adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic French masterpiece “The Three Musketeers.” The star-studded cast includes François Civil, Eva Green and Vincent Cassel as D’Artagnan, Milady and Athos. The two sprawling feature films, titled “The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan” and “The Three Musketeers

Parallel worlds commingle with initially intriguing but progressively less invigorating results in “A Writer’s Odyssey,” a handsomely produced action-fantasy directed by Chinese hitmaker Lu Yang (“Brotherhood of Blades,” “The Sacrifice”). Centered on a desperate father whose search for his missing daughter draws him into a plot to assassinate the author of an online fantasy novel,

With “To All the Boys: Always and Forever,” Netflix wraps its epistolary teen-angst trilogy in such a way that those who’ve been following along since the beginning should appreciate: with a letter. What began as a high-concept high-school romcom has gently matured over two and a half years into a surprisingly low-drama look at the

On “Saturday Night Live,” sketch characters arrive, connect with the audience (or not), and hit occasional sustained peaks of popularity, becoming laugh-riot fixtures and old friends. For a while, starting in the ’90s, the highest honor you could bestow upon an “SNL” character was for him or her to be given their own spin-off movie.

Few types of films are more awkward to sit through than listless and unremarkable biographical documentaries that fall short of their inspiring subjects. Touring the film festival circuit since 2019 and finally available to the general public via virtual cinemas, Freida Lee Mock’s “Ruth – Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words” unfortunately yields one such

Kevin Hart’s personal shopper has been indicted by the Queens County Grand Jury on grand larceny, among other charges, for allegedly using the comedian’s credit card to defraud him out of more than $1 million. Dylan Jason Syer could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. “No one is immune to being targeted

“Well, this may seem like déjà vu…” wrote filmmaker Tamara Saviano on her Facebook page this week, alerting friends that her documentary about musician Guy Clark, “Without Getting Killed or Caught” was being announced Thursday as premiering at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival… just as  it was announced for last year. The good

Robert B. “Bob” Steuer, a longtime film sales executive with AIP, Film Ventures, 20th Century Fox and Premiere Entertainment Services, died Feb. 5 in Tarzana, Calif. after a long battle with dementia. He was 86. Born in New Orleans, Steuer graduated Tulane University and joined the U.S. Army where he held the rank of second lieutenant.

Hungarian cinematographer Marcell Rév is a long-time collaborator of “Malcolm & Marie” writer-director Sam Levinson. The pair first worked together on Levinson’s feature debut “Assassination Nation” and continued into the hit HBO series “Euphoria.” For their latest, most intimate feat, a two-hander starring Zendaya and John David Washington as a couple confronting their turbulent relationships

Disney CEO Bob Chapek debunked speculation that “Black Widow,” the upcoming Marvel superhero adventure starring Scarlett Johansson, may debut on the Disney Plus streaming service. “Black Widow” is currently scheduled to open theatrically on May 7, which would make it the first blockbuster of 2021. “We are still intending it to be a theatrical release,”

David Fincher’s films are known for displaying an actor’s full capabilities during an emotional scene, but that doesn’t always mean the director captures the right moment in the first take. Appearing in Variety‘s “Directors on Directors” conversation series, Ben Affleck (“Argo”) proposes a theory to Fincher (“Mank”) about his two competing instincts as a filmmaker. “One

Adam Wingard, director of the upcoming monster showdown “Godzilla vs. Kong,” will helm the remake of the 1997 thriller “Face/Off” for Paramount. Wingard will write the script with longtime collaborator Simon Barrett. The two have previously worked on the 2016 found footage horror film “Blair Witch,” the 2014 thriller “The Guest” and the 2010 horror

From the onset, “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell and production designer Michael Perry had decided that bright candy colors would be the foundation for the film. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a young woman wounded by events from her medical school years who decides to take revenge on the men who caused her best friend

The Portland Art Museum and the Northwest Film Center announced the annual Cinema Unbound Awards honorees on Thursday. This year’s honorees include Steve McQueen, Garrett Bradley, Gus Van Sant, Mollye Asher and Alex Bulkley. The awards will be presented on March 4, kicking off the 44th Annual Portland International Film Festival, which will run from

Listen to the theme song of Nicolas Cage’s new horror movie “Willy’s Wonderland” and chances are you won’t be able to get it out of your heard. Here, Variety gives you the first listen to the full creepy, yet catchy “The Birthday Song and Willy’s Jingle.” In the Kevin Lewis-directed film, Cage plays a man