Movies

Visar Morina’s “Exile,” a tense psychodrama about a Kosovan pharmacologist in Germany who becomes increasingly paranoid over a series of menacing events, won the top prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival, earning the Kosovo-born German director the Heart of Sarajevo. The award ceremony took place online Thursday night, with Morina winning top honors from a

Ben Affleck will don the cape and cowl once again, returning as Batman in Ezra Miller’s “The Flash” for Warner Bros. Director Andy Muschietti revealed the news in an interview with Vanity Fair. He told the magazine that Affleck got the script last week and agreed this week to join the project. Affleck starred as

J.C. Chandor, the director behind Netflix’s action adventure “Triple Frontier,” is in talks to direct Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter.” The movie, hailing from Sony’s universe of Marvel characters, is based on Spider-Man’s formidable foe. Matt Tolmach and Avi Arad are producing the film, and Richard Wenk (“The Equalizer”) is writing the screenplay. “Kraven the Hunter” will

Dylan O’Brien’s “Love and Monsters” will skip theaters to head straight to premium video on demand on Oct. 16. Paramount Pictures’ science-fiction adventure had been scheduled to open theatrically on Feb. 12, 2021. Paramount made the announcement on Thursday amid ongoing uncertainty over the gradual reopening of movie theaters in North America after being mostly

MGM is re-launching its Orion Pictures as a mean to amplify underserved voices and has hired veteran executive Alana Mayo as president of the label. The studio announced Thursday that Orion will concentrate exclusively on underrepresented voices and authentic storytelling in film with a focus on developing, producing and acquiring feature films that amplify underserved

Whoopi Goldberg, Lee Daniels, Marvel executive Victoria Alonso and more Hollywood heavyweights are on board for a new virtual conversation series from the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The series, titled “Academy Dialogues: It Starts With Us,” is part of the group’s Aperture 2025 equity and inclusion initiative. Topics will include race,

Netflix has apologized for and withdrawn a poster for its upcoming coming-of-age drama “Cuties.” The artwork for the French-language film depicted four adolescent girls wearing revealing cheerleading outfits and posting provocatively, drawing backlash on social media for “sexualizing” little girls. The Parents Television Council implored Netflix to remove the film, rated M, from its site. “It

Paramount Pictures is receiving financial aid from New Republic Pictures on a pair of Tom Cruise projects — “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Top Gun: Maverick” — and eight other movies. New Republic, led by veteran producers Brian Oliver and Bradley Fischer, announced Thursday that it had closed a co-financing deal that will also include “The

Universal has selected participants for the studio’s 2020 Writers Program, a paid initiative that spotlights up-and-coming scribes. Universal’s Global Talent Development and Inclusion, the division that runs the program, said 1,500 people applied, making it the biggest applicant pool since the program started six years ago. Jennifer Coates, Angela Delgado, Satinder Kaur and Larry Santana

STXfilms has bought the KJ Apa and Sofia Carson-led pandemic thriller “Songbird” for release in North America and the United Kingdom. The film recently wrapped production after shooting entirely in Los Angeles during lockdown. “Songbird” is produced by Michael Bay, Adam Goodman and Andrew Sugerman’s Invisible Narratives, and Catchlight Films. “Songbird” producers announced on July

Singer-songwriter-actor Kat Cunning has signed with Lava Records, home to Lorde, Greta Van Fleet, Jessie J and other artists — and debuts with the song and video “Supernova,” which you can see below. Produced by Sir Nolan (Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber) and Simon Says (Selena Gomez, Bryce Vine), the track is likely to appear on

The Hong Kong International Film Festival named Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s “The Cloud in Her Room” and “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection” by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese as winners of its Firebird Young Cinema competitions, despite the event having been canceled due to COVID-19 pandemic. The festival was initially postponed from its usual spring

Versatile Bollywood star, Ayushmann Khurrana is bullish about returning to the theatrical experience as soon as possible, when Indian cinemas reopen after the coronavirus pandemic. Indian cinemas have been dark since mid-March, and during this time several mainstream Bollywood films switched track and went direct to OTT platforms. These include “Gulabo Sitabo,” starring Khurrana and

Romanian lawmakers voted Wednesday night to revise the country’s 35-45% cash rebate, topping up the €50 million ($59 million) annual fund to finance the cashback scheme through 2023 and breathing fresh life into the local film industry. The move ended an anxious period of speculation for the Romanian biz, which saw months-long delays in applications

Directors U.K., the professional association of U.K. screen directors with more than 7,000 members, has published “Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19,” containing guidelines toward shooting sex scenes during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The suggestions offered in the new guidance, that assumes that a production has already complied with COVID-19 health and safety practices, lay

Seymour Tahirbekov is a reluctant chess star, a young grandmaster from Azerbaijan whose life is rigidly controlled by his emotionally toxic father and coach. On the eve of his showdown with the defending world champion, Seymour’s nerves began to fray, and he escapes to a remote island populated by wild horses and a solitary old

When a wolf pack attacks the herd of a shepherd living in the mountainous hinterlands of Anatolia, he vows to get a better gun to protect himself, his sheep and his family: a Mauser, the so-called “king of rifles,” and the most powerful gun of its time. He strikes a bargain with a local dealer

Tom Hanks-starring drama “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” will join a thickening crowd of local and international films heading for Chinese movie theaters in the next six weeks. The film, about beloved U.S. TV host Mr. Rogers, received investment from China’s Tencent Pictures in the early part of last year and received its stateside

The 1999 Drew Barrymore romcom “Never Been Kissed” is referenced multiple times in “Words on Bathroom Walls,” with the older film cast in a rosy Proustian glow that may come as a jolt to any viewers who remember the 20th century. Fully 21st-century teens Adam (Charlie Plummer) and Maya (Taylor Russell) describe it as a

Former Fox News reporter and current KTLA-TV anchor Courtney Friel has set up a biopic with Zero Gravity Management, Variety has learned exclusively. Zero Gravity has optioned the rights to Friel’s memoir “Tonight At 10: Kicking Booze and Breaking News” for its Inspire division. The book details her ascent in the news business, including getting

Olivia Wilde has signed a deal with Sony Pictures to develop and direct an untitled, female-centric Marvel film project for the studio, sources have told Variety. Representatives for Sony and Marvel had no comment about the project. Speculation has arisen in the recent months about Sony developing a movie centering on the Spider-Woman character. The

There’s a lot of high-speed activity in your average children’s movie — the slapstick-on-steroids physical comedy, the rapid-fire dialogue. All of which can be exhausting (see: “Spies in Disguise,” the “Rio” films, “Cars 3”), though it can also be creative, as in the “Toy Story” films or “Sing” or the outsize digital spectacle of “Ralph

Ron Meyer sought the assistance of the FBI soon after being threatened with the exposure of his affair with actress Charlotte Kirk, two sources familiar with the matter told Variety. Meyer stepped down as vice chairman of NBCUniversal on Tuesday after informing the company of the affair and of the existence of a confidential settlement.

“Jojo Rabbit” breakout and “Home Alone” reboot star Archie Yates is voicing the lead role in the animated VR film “Paper Birds,” which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Award-winning VR shop Baobab Studios has come on board the project to produce along with Facebook’s Oculus and Latin American animation studio 3DAR. “Paper Birds,”

Dino come, dino go: The first three “Jurassic Park” films will roll off Netflix’s U.S. service at the end of September, just two months after the streamer got its talons on the Universal fan-favorite trilogy. Meanwhile, Netflix has set a Sept. 18 premiere date for DreamWorks Animation’s “Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous,” a new animated series

The arena of film criticism continues to look like a man’s world. A new study shows that in early 2020, male film reviewers outnumbered their female counterparts by nearly 2 to 1, before the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the film business and movie theaters closed worldwide this spring. Female film critics contributed 35% of the film

French Argentine actor Bérénice Bejo discussed her early career, breaking into French cinema and starring in a silent film, as part of the 2020 Sarajevo Film Festival masterclass series, hosted by Variety Streaming Room. The conversation and subsequent audience Q&A, moderated by film critic Peter Debruge, covered the actor’s performance in “After Love” and “The

The news on Tuesday that NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer, one of the longest-tenured top executives in Hollywood, had been fired from NBCUniversal due to fallout from an extramarital affair was big enough to rock the industry. But then the news broke that the woman Meyer had the relationship with was none other than Charlotte

Clive Davis has never seen a documentary on Whitney Houston that captured the artist and the person he knew so well. So he set out more than a year go to produce a movie biopic of the chart-topping singer of such indelible 1980s and ’90s hits such as “Saving All My Love For You,” “So

STXfilms has signed Pete Davidson and O’Shea Jackson to star in the drama-comedy movie “American Sole,” set in the world of after-market sneakers. “American Sole” follows two twenty-somethings (Davidson and a soon-to-be-named co-star) with mountains of college debt who use the fast cash of after-market sneaker reselling to achieve their American dream. But they run