Movies

“Mass,” a drama that consists of two couples seated across a table from each other in a placidly sterile church antechamber, discussing the unthinkable (two of them are the parents of a teenage boy who was killed in a school shooting; the other two are the parents of the shooter), is a movie you could

How to introduce an entity as mercurial as Sparks, the band that forms the subject of Edgar Wright’s fantastic, fond, fizzy documentary portrait, to those who don’t know them? With over five decades and 25 albums’ worth of music, sibling frontmen Ron and Russell Mael have been virtually the only constant in a group whose

“You get used to feeling mediocre,” says one of the merely very bright students in a school full of what he considers “geniuses.” “Try Harder,” Debbie Lum’s simultaneously charming and chastening documentary on the senior class in Lowell High — the majority Asian-American, top-ranked school in San Francisco — takes its cue from its lovable,

Issues of identity, assimilation and the contemporary Native American experience run deep beneath Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s feature debut, “Wild Indian,” while the surface narrative is one that any filmmaker could have told, albeit in a less original context. Watching “Wild Indian,” I was reminded of “Moonlight,” with its three distinct time periods. “Wild Indian”

The cast and crew of “How It Ends” discussed the “apocalyptic comedy’s” connection to pandemic-era life and the worldwide appeal of the phenomenon that is Timothée Chalamet. Co-writers and directors Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones, along with star Cailee Spaeny, joined Sundance Film Festival’s Variety Studio presented by AT&T TV to discuss the makings of their

India will allow 100% occupancy in cinemas from Feb. 1, the country’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting announced on Saturday. Cinemas began reopening in October 2020 with 50% occupancy. “Seating arrangement inside the auditorium of the cinemas/theatres/multiplexes is to be allowed upto 100% seating capacity,” read a statement from the Ministry. Exhibition of films, however,

In a record-setting purchase, Apple Studios has emerged as the winner of “CODA,” the virtual Sundance sensation about a young hearing girl who grapples with breaking away from her deaf family. The Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht-led studio paid close to $25 million for the film, breaking last year’s recording setting “Palm Springs” sale

“In the Same Breath” isn’t shot like most documentaries. Towards the beginning of the film, director Nanfu Wang describes the process by which she chose her collaborators, explaining how she contacted camera operators on the ground in Wuhan to see if they would feel comfortable working on a film that exposes the COVID-19 misinformation campaign

Best known for his gripping and visceral work on “High-Rise” and Netflix’s recent “Rebecca,” director Ben Wheatley’s latest Sundance offering “In The Earth” is a return to the bloody, brain-scrambling flicks he cut his teeth on. Wheatley joined his cast Ellora Torchia and Joel Fry at Variety’s Sundance Studio, presented by AT&T, to discuss his

Mandy Patinkin and Lena Dunham have joined German filmmaker Julia von Heinz’s next film, “Iron Box,” about a New York businesswoman who decides to take her aging father back to his native Poland, where she hopes to explore her Jewish roots. In an interview with Variety during last year’s Venice Film Festival following the premiere

For more than two decades, Gareth Jones had spent late January and early February in snowy Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. But on Thursday night, Jones didn’t have to get on a plane to attend the annual film festival. Instead, he drove to the Sidewalk Film Fest and Cinema in downtown Birmingham,

Among the films in World Cinema Dramatic Competition at this year’s virtual Sundance is the darkly comic “El Planeta,” the debut feature of Spanish-Argentine artist Amalia Ulman, who has worked in video, sculpture and performance art. Ulman is best-known for her 2014 performance art piece “Excellences and Perfections” (more on that here), which was included

Particular Crowd, the fledgling U.S.-based film division from WarnerMedia’s Turner Latin America, has nabbed all Latin American rights to Argentine filmmaker Marcos Carnevale’s latest film, the dramedy “El Cuartito.” Shot and produced entirely in Puerto Rico, “El Cuartito” refers to the security screening room that five Latinos are confined in when they run afoul of

“On the Count of Three” is a trifle, but an original one: an existential buddy comedy of despair. It opens with Val (Jerrod Carmichael) and Kevin (Christopher Abbott) standing outside a strip club in the middle of the day, pointing handguns at each other in what looks like a tense Mexican standoff. But the two

Last year, Ben Wheatley released a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” in which his heroine suffers a trippy newlywed’s nightmare. She’s married to Armie Hammer, following him through the halls of Manderley, and the hallway carpet turns to crawling ivy, grabbing her ankles and pulling her down toward hell. This hallucination stands out in the

After the arduous months we’ve had, who has the energy or brain space to sit through a more than two-hour-long heavy drama, especially when real-life is daunting enough as it is? Naturally, Variety has you covered with a list of the 35 best feel-good romantic comedies streaming now on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max

There’s an abandoned bunker in John’s backyard. Most kids would probably see it as a place to play, the basis for a hideout or secret fort. Some might climb in and get trapped, and then we’d hear all about it on the news. Not John. John goes through life in kind of a daze, a

If you ever found yourself staring at an old childhood photograph, scrutinizing what your younger self was thinking in that moment, the idiosyncratically existential comedy “How It Ends” will leave a bittersweet aftertaste. Especially if you happen to catch this oddly sedative (if not tiresomely repetitive) Sundance 2021 premiere amid the loneliness of the ongoing

It’s not often one sees a film arguing against its own topicality, but that’s what happens at the outset of “The Pink Cloud,” a subtly fevered quarantine drama that is so of the moment, you all but wonder how they had time to shoot and cut it just last week. But they didn’t, as an

Paramount and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot have brought on “The Batman” series showrunner Joe Barton to write the script for an untitled sequel to “Cloverfield,” the studio has confirmed. Abrams will produce with Bad Robot head of film Hannah Minghella. The 2008 monster movie became a viral hit, grossing $172 million worldwide, and was the

“When You Finish Saving the World” creator and performer Jesse Eisenberg reflected on the creative freedom that comes with producing an Audible original drama. Variety, in partnership with Audible, hosted a conversation with the team behind the original drama, including Eisenberg, actor and musician Finn Wolfhard and Audible’s executive vice president and head of content Rachel Ghiazza.

Believe the accolades: Maria Sødahl’s perceptive, heartfelt “Hope” richly deserves all the attention it’s gotten at festivals and award ceremonies since premiering in Toronto in 2019. Naturally, any movie with such a title dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis will have some kind of sting, but “Limbo” director Sødahl, who mined her own brush with

Rita Moreno’s most indelible screen moment, which had her and a “West Side Story” ensemble sizing up the pros and cons of their adopted U.S. homeland, remains an eternally clever musical argument over whether “America” is a dream or nightmare for immigrants, settling in at a 50/50 split. The balance is skewed more along the

The creators behind Baobab Studios will talk about building their award-winning VR animation house as it celebrates its five year anniversary during a PreVIEW virtual talk on Saturday, Jan. 30, beginning at 10 a.m. PT, presented by the VIEW Conference. Baobab is behind the innovative animated VR shorts ““Asteroids,” “Invasion,” “Crow the Legend,” “Bonfire,” “Jack:

“Dying isn’t simple, is it?” That question is asked at three separate points in “I Was a Simple Man,” and with each repetition, it sounds slightly less rhetorical, less worldly-wise, more loaded with anxious uncertainty. Christopher Makoto Yogi’s hushed, ruminative study of an elderly man’s last days in Oahu doesn’t quite settle on an answer

As voting opens for the Oscar shortlists on Feb. 1, the picture is slowly coming into focus: Academy composers and songwriters are faced with one of the most diverse batches of scores they’ve ever heard. The approximately 350 members of the Academy music branch are sifting through dozens of films to try and single out

“Night of the Kings” director Philippe Lacôte reflected on the creative flexibility required to make his film and the birth of a new cinematic industry in the Ivory Coast. Lacôte spoke at Variety Sundance Studio, presented by AT&T TV, on his experiences putting together the cast. “Night of the Kings” is a drama fantasy pic

The dilemma that “Pieces of a Woman” posed for composer Howard Shore was how emotional to make the music in a story about the most wrenching and devastating experience in a couple’s life. “We had many discussions about this exact topic,” Shore says, referring to himself and Kornél Mundruczó, who directed the movie, now streaming

Top Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan is set to star in the Indian adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy drama “The Night Manager,” Variety can reveal. Roshan will play an Indian version of the Jonathan Pine character, who was played by Tom Hiddleston (“Avengers: Endgame”) in the 2016 adaptation, which aired on the BBC and AMC,

Poh Si Teng, producer of Oscar-nominated documentary short “St. Louis Superman,” has joined the International Documentary Association (IDA) as the new director of the IDA Funds and Enterprise program. Poh will oversee and build IDA’s grants portfolio and serve as a key liaison with the documentary field in the U.S. and globally, working with IDA’s