Movies

Watching Iranian director Majid Majidi’s “Sun Children,” I was reminded of “The Florida Project.” One of the best films about children of the 21st century, “The Florida Project” takes place within a stone’s throw of Walt Disney World, where it seems a dream too much for its neglected kid characters to visit, until, in the

New York and Oslo-based writer/director Mona Fastvold made her directorial debut with “The Sleepwalker,” which unlocked secrets between two sisters and made a splash in 2014 at Sundance. Her ambitious followup “The World to Come” stars Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby as two farmers’ wives in 1856 Upstate New York who fall in love but have no template,

Hungarian stage and screen director Kornel Mundruczo and partner/screenwriter Kata Weber collaborated closely on “Pieces of a Woman,” in which Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf play a Boston couple devastated by the loss of their newborn baby during a home birth. The film had its world premiere on Saturday in the main competition section of the

Filmmaker Nathan Grossman has followed Greta Thunberg’s remarkable journey from the earliest stages of her school strike for climate in 2018 to the United Nations Climate Action Summit last September, often operating as a one-man band shooting quietly in the background with fairly basic camera equipment. “As the movement grew and she grew, and the

Chaitanya Tamhane’s “The Disciple,” the first Indian film in Venice Film Festival’s competition since 2001, is set across three different time frames. It follows an aspiring classical music performer, Sharad Nerulkar, played by debutant Aditya Modak, on a journey that resembles that of a monk following a guru, experiencing sacrifice and solitude along the way.

The cast of Rob Reiner’s 1987 film “The Princess Bride” is reuniting for a virtual script reading and fundraiser benefitting the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Reiner, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn and Billy Crystal will read the script on Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. CT, followed by a Q&A

“Miss Marx” is a biopic bookended by death, colored by it throughout. It introduces us to socialist activist Eleanor Marx at the funeral of her father Karl, and follows her through to her untimely suicide, at the age of 43, some 15 years later. Ghosts of the past and future weigh heavily on her in

For months, the entire entertainment industry has monomaniacally focused on how to return to work amid the coronavirus pandemic. Reams of health and safety protocols have dictated everything from proper PPE attire to testing schedules to how many people can be on a set, and by July and August, a small handful of major productions

Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” will cross the $100 million mark internationally on Saturday. It passes that important milestone after the twisty thriller made just over $20 million in China so far this weekend. Those numbers are pretty standard for Nolan, who has a golden touch when it comes to blockbusters, having previously guided “Inception,” “Dunkirk,” and

The first look at David Fincher’s highly anticipated drama “Mank” was revealed Saturday to coincide with the 79th anniversary of “Citizen Kane’s” wide theatrical opening. The film is Fincher’s first feature directing effort since 2014’s “Gone Girl” and chronicles Herman Mankiewicz’s (Gary Oldman) race to finish the “Citizen Kane” screenplay for Orson Welles (Tom Burke).

One can imagine an American director such as Norman Jewison or Sidney Lumet directing a film about the legal battle at the heart of “Pieces of a Woman”: A terrible tragedy has occurred, and an expectant young Boston couple (played by Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf) have taken their midwife (Molly Parker) to court. The

Are there signs of green shoots of recovery for the indie film industry following the profound business disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic? “We’re living through a rapidly changing time,” says Brian Beckman, CFO of international sales company and producer Arclight Films, which is handling worldwide sales on “The Furnace,” an Australian adventure story, screening

Seven years after Gia Coppola turned a dreamily sympathetic eye on the pretty, youthful wasters of her high-school-set debut “Palo Alto,” she returns with “Mainstream,” packing a far smaller store of compassion and a lot less insight into the next micro-life-stage of telegenic wasted youth. A brittle, exasperated satire on social media celebrity, her sophomore

Speaking at a panel event on Friday held as part of the Venice Production Bridge, the Venice Film Festival’s industry section, a trio of industry heavyweights argued that in order to keep the continental film and TV business competitive in a period marked by change and unrest, the European Commission would have to free up

Who is Greta Thunberg? On the one hand, practically everybody on the planet knows: She’s the Swedish teenage climate change activist with the Pippi Longstocking braids and the stern, strident oratorical style, who has resolved to be a thorn in the side of all major world powers until they make her environmental agenda their top

Seven years after the release of her 2013 debut feature “Palo Alto,” which was nominated for the Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival, Gia Coppola is back with her sophomore drama, “Mainstream.” The film, which centers on a trio of young, fledgling Angelenos—Maya Hawke, Andrew Garfield and Nat Wolff—who rise to Internet fame, world

Susanna Nicchiarelli’s “Nico, 1988,” about the German singer who performed with the Velvet Underground, made a splash in Venice in 2017 when it took top honors in the cutting-edge Horizons section. She’s back on the Lido – now in the main competition – with another biopic, “Miss Marx,” about Karl Marx’s ill-fated younger daughter Eleanor,

Cate Blanchett reminisced warmly about Lorenzo Soria at an event held during the Venice Film Festival where the recently deceased president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. was commemorated. “He was such a calm in the eye of the storm,” Blanchett said, remembering Soria, who died prematurely on Aug. 7 at the age of 68.

Perhaps the most difficult task faced by any filmmaker attempting to commemorate an atrocity is to manage the vast disparities in scale. To communicate the extent of a war crime like the Srebrenica massacre, which saw 8,372 civilian residents of the Bosnian town, mostly men and boys, murdered by units of the Bosnian Serb Army

Warner Bros. Pictures is out for some justice of its own. The studio has responded to Friday claims from “Justice League” actor Ray Fisher, specifically regarding the conduct of the top executive at their DC Films unit and the efficiency of their internal investigation into the 2017 superhero film in which Fisher starred. The WarnerMedia-owned

The live-action remake of Disney’s “Mulan” is a story rooted in Chinese culture and a tale of forging one’s own path, said the film’s director and stars during the #GoldOpen Premium Access panel moderated by Variety‘s Audrey Cleo Yap on Friday evening, one of three panels with cast members airing throughout the weekend. Director Niki

In a video uploaded to her YouTube channel on Aug. 31, actor Tiffany Haddish opened up about her experience with COVID-19 and interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci about how the virus specifically affects the Black community. Haddish said that she had the coronavirus around three months ago after two people she had been in contact with

A round of layoffs and furloughs were enacted at Hollywood talent agency ICM Partners last week, Variety has learned. As many as 15 junior agents and coordinators were cut or furloughed across multiple departments including motion picture literature, branding, legal and the agency’s concert business. The news was delivered last Thursday, said sources. “Due to

If the improbably named Kempton Bunton hadn’t really lived, Ealing Studios would probably have written him into existence. A 60-year-old working-class Newcastle gent with a cheeky sense of humor and a cheerily rabble-rousing spirit, who just happened to be implicated in a headline-making London art heist, he was born to be the hero of a

When settlers began opening up the wild frontier of Western Australia in the 19th century, they relied heavily on immigrant cameleers from India, Afghanistan, and Persia. The predominantly Muslim and Sikh group, commonly referred to as “Ghans,” were instrumental in settling the Outback, but their contributions to the formation of modern-day Australia have largely been

In 1961, a daring daylight robbery was committed in London, when Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812-14), recently auctioned for a massive £140,000 ($186,000), was stolen from its new home in the capital’s National Gallery. The story was big news – so big, in fact, that the painting was referenced in 1963’s “Dr.

This is the weekend American film fans have been waiting for with the release of a pair of the year’s biggest movies — Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” and Disney’s live-action version of “Mulan” — after considerable delay. The fact that the two strategies for sharing these two movies with the public are so wildly different —

Italy’s period of combatting terrorism from the late 1960s to the late ’80s, known as the “Years of Lead,” remains a richly-mined topic in cinema, more successfully processed on screen than through any of the official bodies charged with accountability. Digging into his personal trauma from that era, director Claudio Noce (“The Ice Forest”) takes

Even before coronavirus arrived in South Africa, which ranks among the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, Durban FilmMart head Toni Monty had already begun to envision how sub-Saharan Africa’s leading industry confab would have to adapt to an unprecedented global crisis. “Not one of us on the team have actually seen each other physically

“Linda and the Mockingbirds,” a documentary about Linda Ronstadt making a journey to Mexico to explore her musical roots there, has been picked up for worldwide rights by Shout! Studios, the distribution and production division of the Shout! Factory home video company. The film was originally slated to premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over