Movies

You wouldn’t know it from the marketing campaign, but Shia LaBeouf is not the star of “The Tax Collector.” And for once, the actor isn’t the most interesting thing about a film he’s involved with — this despite the fact that he’s attracted a lot of press over getting his chest tattooed for the part.

Road-rage thriller “Unhinged,” starring Russell Crowe, topped the U.K. and Ireland box office over the weekend collecting £175,263 ($229,000), according to final numbers released by Comscore. The film, released by Altitude Film Distribution, played at 243 locations, marking a cautious return by audiences to cinemas, despite the territory being in the middle of a heat

Suzanne Lindon’s “Spring Blossom,” João Paulo Miranda María’s “Memory House” and Grigory Kolomytsev’s “Chupacabra” will vie for the Kutxabank-New Directors Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, the Basque Country event announced Tuesday. This year, the New Directors competition takes in 11 films from Brazil, China, France, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain,

The British Film Institute Southbank, the iconic London movie theater on the South Bank of the Thames River, is set for a Sept. 1 reopening with a host of health and safely measures in place. The measures include social distancing throughout the venue, face coverings as standard for all visitors and staff, increased frequency of

Sounding a note of hope for the 20 titles selected for Locarno Festival’s highest-profile competition, The Films After Tomorrow, Helena Wittmann’s entry, the sensuous sea odyssey “Human Flowers of Flesh,” is scheduled to go into production on Aug. 12, with “Dogtooth” actor Angeliki Papoulia and “Holy Motors’” Denis Lavant attached to star. The news gains

There’s a visceral, wordless trawl through earthly hell straining to get out from beneath the overwrought script clichés of “Tijuana Bible,” a long-awaited third feature from Frenchman Jean-Charles Hue that echoes, but doesn’t quite fulfil, the promise of his electrifying 2014 breakout “Eat Your Bones.” Following two lost souls through a veritable obstacle course of

MONDAY, AUG. 3 Focus Unveils ‘The Way I See It’ Release Plans Focus Features has announced a September release for “The Way I See It,” Dawn Porter’s documentary about White House photographer Pete Souza. The documentary is based on Souza’s New York Times bestsellers, “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” and “Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents.”

A Norwegian entertainment reporter sued the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on Monday, alleging a “culture of corruption” under which reporters abuse their power to suppress competition. Kjersti Flaa filed the complaint in federal court in Los Angeles, claiming the HFPA operates as a cartel in violation of antitrust laws. The HFPA has 87 members, whose

Netflix is in early negotiations to buy Amy Adams’ thriller “The Woman in the Window” from Disney, sources confirm to Variety. Disney had originally scheduled the movie for Oct. 4, 2019, then delayed the film to May 15, 2020, before taking it off the release schedule amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Disney had acquired the movie

“The Kissing Booth” star Joey King is in negotiations to join the cast of Brad Pitt’s action-adventure “Bullet Train.” The Sony Pictures project, based on Kotaro Isaka’s Japanese novel “Maria Beetle,” will be directed by David Leitch from a script by Zak Olkewicz. Leitch and Kelly McCormick will produce “Bullet Train” through 87North, along with

Bradley Cooper is poised to team up with Paul Thomas Anderson, a meeting of the mega-talents that should please film lovers. The “American Sniper” star is in talks to appear in Anderson’s next, deeply secretive venture, which is being described as a coming-of-age story set in 1970s San Fernando Valley. That’s a geographic terrain that

Three weeks after a spike in coronavirus cases forced the Telluride Film Festival team to cancel its 2020 event, organizers have announced the lineup that would have been. “The Show,” as the festival refers to its annual feature program, planned to include “Ammonite,” a love story co-starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan; “The Rider” director

When “The Kissing Booth 2” premiered on July 24, Taylor Zakhar Perez had about 70,000 followers on Instagram. Within a week, he had three million. But that should come as no real surprise because Perez is the newest hottie in the “Kissing Booth” franchise. Directed, co-written and produced by Vince Marcello, the sequel to Netflix’s

STXfilms has bought U.S. rights Kevin Macdonald’s untitled legal thriller, starring Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Tahar Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch. The film, which was formerly known as “Prisoner 760.” is based on Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir “Guantánamo Diary,” centers on Slahi (Rahim), who languishes in prison for years without charge or trial until he finds

“An American Pickle” is a comedy that connects you to something so old world that it seems, at times, to be an artifact of prehistory. No, I’m not talking about Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen), a glumly bearded Orthodox Jewish ditch digger from 1919 who escapes the Cossacks by emigrating from Schlupsk (a fictional Eastern European

Stephanie Allain has been selected as this year’s recipient of the PGA/UCLA Vision Award for her work championing visionary filmmakers of color and women. The UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television made the announcement Monday. The award, presented by the UCLA TFT Producers Program in consultation with the Producers Guild of America, is being

Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Shame,” is best known for his searing big-screen work. So it is fitting that the New York Film Festival would turn to the British auteur to kick off its 58th edition with his new work “Lovers Rock. McQueen joins a long list of cinema

The Locarno Film Festival’s Locarno Pro industry side is trying to rise to the challenge faced by many festivals that have been forced to cancel their physical editions. “The one thing I wanted to avoid was doing something just for the sake of doing something,” says Valentina Merli, who became head of Locarno Pro in

The Locarno Film Festival is reinventing itself due to the coronavirus crisis by launching a plan B called Locarno 2020 — For the Future of Films, its core philosophy being to support global indie film directors hard hit by the pandemic as they toiled to bring their projects to the big screen. “In April we

Santiago Segura’s “Father There Is Only One 2” has punched €2.14 million ($2.5 million) across its first five days in Spain over July 29-Aug. 2, according to Comscore, maintaining its bid to become Europe’s first COVID-19 era blockbuster. With some cinema theater takings still to come in, the box office trawl is at least 21%

Regina King’s directorial debut “One Night in Miami” and Pedro Almodovar’s Jean Cocteau adaptation “The Human Voice,” starring Tilda Swinton, have been added to the lineup of the Venice Film Festival’s upcoming 77th edition. Both additions will screen out-of-competition. “One Night in Miami,” to which Amazon Studios recently acquired worldwide rights, takes place in 1964

Action thriller “Steel Rain 2: Summit” dominated the South Korean box office in its opening weekend. In doing so, it knocked “Peninsula” from the perch where it had been for the past two weeks. Released on Wednesday by Lotte Entertainment, “Steel Rain 2” earned $4.92 million from 663,000 admissions over the weekend. Over its five

Tom Pollock, the former chairman of Universal Pictures and the American Film Institute, died Saturday of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 77. “We are incredibly saddened by the loss of Tom Pollock,” said NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer in a statement. “He played a critical role in securing our studio’s

“Pineapple Express” fans will be disappointed to learn that a sequel was shot down over budget concerns from Sony. In an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” on Wednesday, Rogen said Sony wasn’t interested in a “Pineapple Express 2” movie several years ago when it was being pitched. “We tried to make one and

Local content is proving more of a draw than Hollywood films as China’s cinemas get back on their feet. Chinese drama “Enigma of Arrival” quashed “Dolittle” and “Jojo Rabbit” to take the top spot in theaters’ second weekend back in business, while a local animation bested the whimpering China debut of Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.”

After testing positive for coronavirus last month, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has recovered and was discharged from the hospital, he announced on Sunday. The Indian actor, who is 77 years old, was admitted to Mumbai’s Nanavati hospital on July 11, a little more than three weeks ago. On Twitter, the actor thanked the “excellent care

Delayed by over a year for mysterious political reasons, epic Chinese war film “The Eight Hundred” has finally locked down a date for release in theaters. It will open in conventional and Imax cinemas in China from Aug. 21, making it one of the first outings for a high-profile local film since Chinese cinemas hesitantly

More than 150 people in Rhode Island accidentally received tax refund checks signed by none other than Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney, rather than their state officials. According to CNN, the misprinted signatures were on 176 tax refund checks. The error was the result of a technical glitch in the printing system for the state’s

Charlize Theron hosted a drive-in screening of “Mad Max: Fury Road” on Friday night in Los Angeles. The festivities, which served as a fundraiser for the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, took place on top of the parking structure at the Grove mall. Here, Variety goes inside the event for a look at how Theron

Back in October (which, in a COVID-19 timeline, may as well be last century) a smallish film called “Lucy in the Sky,” starring Natalie Portman as a post-mission astronaut struggling to accept the limitations of life on earth, opened and closed in short order. It was neither as bad as its dismal reviews and mortifying