Movies

Disney’s “Mulan” made only $6.47 million over its second weekend in China, allowing it to be handily defeated once again by the local war epic “The Eight Hundred,” according to data from industry tracker Maoyan. As of Sunday evening, the Disney title has earned a cumulative $36.5 million (RMB 247 million) in the key territory.

The Toronto International Film Festival’s Grolsch People’s Choice Award is one of the first indicators for a film heading towards the Dolby Theatre during an awards season. On Sunday, “Nomadland” from Chloé Zhao won the TIFF audience award, joining a list of epic pictures that have gone on to Oscar attention. The Searchlight Pictures film

A gracious and deliberate Johnny Depp was joined by “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan” director and music video/documentary filmmaker Julien Temple on Sunday for a San Sebastian Festival press conference about their documentary, playing in the main competition. “I’ve had a long, long history with Shane,” Depp started out, explaining his

Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland,” which took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, has won the top People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The win bodes well for the film’s Oscar chances. In the last decade, every People’s Choice Award winner has gone on to earn a best picture nomination at the

Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” hit an important milestone, crossing the $250 million mark at the global box office. That benchmark is bolstered by international revenues, where the sci-fi thriller has surpassed $200 million in ticket sales. But in the U.S., “Tenet” is still struggling to attract audiences. The movie earned $4.7 million in its third weekend,

In “Infidel,” Jim Caviezel plays Christian blogger Doug Rawlins, who travels to Cairo to participate in a televised conference on religion. The Muslim host seeks commonalities between the two faiths. “We love Jesus Christ,” the man says, after which Doug pauses for a moment, weighing his words, before rejecting the figurative olive branch. “He is

There is no writing credit for “Sportin’ Life,” which feels like an omission, but an apt one. On the one hand, this documentary self-portrait by rogue auteur Abel Ferrara feels wholly the product of his eccentric imagination, colored by his voice from beginning to hasty end. On the other, it’s impossible to imagine such a

A 17-year-old Parisian girl of Algerian parentage struggles to negotiate the conflicting tensions between desire, familial expectation, peer pressure and heritage in debuting writer-director Kamir Aïnouz’s intermittently successful “Honey Cigar.” Refreshingly empowering in how it foregrounds the female gaze together with the young woman’s ownership of her sexual urges, the film too often falls back

Set in Extremadura, south-west Spain, “Nights Gone By” marks the debut feature of Switzerland-based, Madrid-born Alberto Martín Menacho, participating in this year’s ECAM Incubator. One of Spain’s most important film schools, Madrid’s ECAM has long proven a launchpad for generations of Spanish filmmaking talent. Previously, Menacho had put the script through San Sebastian’s Ikusmira Berriak

Solidifying the ties between the ECAM Community of Madrid film school and the European industry, its Screen Incubator, one of its industry programs, has selected Estibaliz Urresola’s “20,000 Species of Bees” among the five new projects in its third edition. Produced by Gariza Films and Urresola’s own Sirimiri Films, the feature turns on Lucía, a

“The Maus” director Yayo Herrero is preparing a second feature, “Los Quinquis,” a standout at this year’s edition of Madrid’s ECAM film school Incubator program, which he will take to this year’s San Sebastian Festival to pitch in the Meet Them! section for projects. Apart from its inclusion at ECAM’s Incubator, the film took part

Palme d’Or winning producer Luis Miñarro (“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) is set to direct his fifth feature, ”Impalpable” (a working title), produced by Miñarro’s label, Barcelona-based Eddie Saeta, one of Spain’s most prominent arthouse shingles. Written by Miñarro, “Impalpable” follows a series of characters who take a bus to an unspecified

There are cinephiles who are transported to aesthetic nirvana by Naomi Kawase’s eco-spiritualism, and there are critics who flee her cinematic ashram. Neither will be wholly satisfied with “True Mothers,” the director’s contemplation of motherhood and adoption, which is her most plot-driven but least visually lustrous film yet. Like most of her previous features, this

In Alvaro Gago’s “Matria,” a 2018 short film Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Ramona works in a canning factory, under the orders of a remarkably termagant, foul-mouthed female factory foreman. Ramona hardly exchanges a word with her husband, but manages the household and her job – a punishing daily routine – and yet still manages

Solstice Studios has bought the worldwide rights to the drama “Good Joe Bell,” starring Mark Wahlberg, for about $20 million, a source has confirmed to Variety. “Good Joe Bell,” directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, premiered Sept. 13 at the virtual Toronto International Film Festival. The deal closed Saturday. Solstice is planning a theatrical release during

At a moment when the personal lives of artists and celebrities are being placed under the spotlight as almost never before, the secret life of Martin Luther King Jr. now seems like more than the disquieting semi-submerged footnote it once did. It’s long been public knowledge that King, during most of the time of his

Storied stuntman Ernie F. Orsatti, who is best known for falling 30 feet through a glass skylight in the 1972 film “The Poseidon Adventure,” has died. He was 80. The Stunt Players Directory Facebook page confirmed his death, writing: “We are saddened to hear of the passing of legendary stuntman Ernie Orsatti. His impeccable work

Actor and filmmaker Matt Dillon has released two clips from “The Great Fellove” [“El Gran Fellove”], a long-gestating documentary chronicling the musical career of Cuban scat singer and showman Francisco ‘el Gran’ Fellove and the recording of his last album, “Fellove & Joey.”  The film is world premiering at the San Sebastian Film Festival and is

Boaz Yakin ‘s romantic dance drama “Aviva” has been sold by Alief Film Company to several big territories. An exploration of gender identity and self-expression through body language, “Aviva,” shot on location in Paris and New York and revolves around a pair of transatlantic lovers, Aviva and Eden. After a long courtship they meet in

Leading Spanish sales, production and distribution company Filmax has secured sales rights for first-time director Carol Rodriguez Colas’ “Girlfriends,” currently in post-production. The company has already started sharing a promo reel with distributors. Filmax has anchored itself as one of the premier sales companies for independent films from new, female filmmakers in Spain such as

Chinese sci-fi blockbuster “The Wandering Earth” was named film of the year by the China Film Directors Guild at its annual awards ceremony on Saturday night in Beijing, local media reported. The award ceremony, which took place coincided with the further re-opening of cinemas in China as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, also presented director of

Barcelona-born filmmaker Isabel Coixet arrived at the San Sebastian Film Festival to receive the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s National Cinematography Prize at a prestigious event hosted at the Tabakalera’s Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea. Coixet, 60, arrived straight from the post-production suite, where last week she finished work on her thirteenth feature film, “It Snows in Benidorm,” starring

Barcelona’s Gadea Films, co-producer of Laura Herrero Garvin’s Mexico City-set documentary “La Mami,” a hit at IDFA, is reaching across the Atlantic once more, linking to Colombia’s Rara Colectivo Audiovisual on the production of Cordelia Alegre’s “La Unión.” Put through this year’s Screen-Incubator at the Madrid Film School (ECAM), “La Unión” marks yet another feature

director whose short films have garnered honors in Japan and abroad, Sato Takuma is celebrating a milestone with the selection of his first theatrical feature, “Any Crybabies Around,” by San Sebastian. Sato set the film in his native Akita Prefecture, at the northern tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. “I wrote a story about

In the studied romance “Ammonite,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is set to be released by Neon in the U.S. on Nov. 13, Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan play two women who forge a life-changing connection in 1840s England. Francis Lee (“God’s Own Country”) wrote and directed the film, in which Winslet plays

A 23-minute birth scene ends in tragedy during “Pieces of a Woman,” a film written by Kata Weber about the pain-filled emotional response and legal fallout that follows a failed home birth. Weber and director Kornel Mundruczo joined stars Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn in Variety‘s Virtual TIFF Studio presented by Canada Goose to discuss

Distributors keep changing their minds right up until the day before their movies are supposed to open in one of the wildest release eras in memory, making it nearly impossible for moviegoers to keep track of what’s opening when, and where, and how. This week’s biggest theatrical opening is a Jim Caviezel movie called “Infidel,”

A quarter of this year’s Cartoon Forum pitches are derived from existing IP and “The Upside Down River” – a high concept mini-series – is a fine example. Based on the book “La rivière à l’envers” by award-winning French children’s author Jean-Claude Mourlevat, the 10-part fantasy adventure comes from the 10-year-old Paris-based producer-distributor Dandelooo, whose animation

Beyond Fest, the highest-attended genre film festival in the U.S., will open on Oct. 2 with the world premiere of Jim Cummings’ werewolf tale “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” and Joe Dante’s classic film “The ‘Burbs.” The social-distanced, drive-in event at the Mission Tiki Drive-In in Montclair, Calif., will close on Oct. 8 with the

To deliver director Antonio Campos’ “The Devil All the Time,” based on Donald Ray Pollock’s acclaimed 2011 novel set against a rural backdrop during the period between World War II and the Vietnam War, cinematographer Lol Crawley aimed to show a town out of step with the times. “We had this idea that the rural