Movies

“Da 5 Bloods,” “Extraction” and “The Crown” are among the shows nominated for the 7th Annual Location Managers Guild International Awards. The LMGI Awards will break from tradition and take place on a virtual platform due to the coronavirus pandemic. Actor and Director Isaiah Mustafa will host the awards ceremony and will be joined by

AMC Theatres has delayed plans to reopen its cinemas as coronavirus cases surge across the United States. The company, which ranks as the country’s largest movie theater chain with more than 600 locations, will now open its venues in mid to late August. The problem of when and how moviegoing can safely resume and cinemas

As a second wave of COVID-19 escalates in Spain, Sony Pictures Releasing has moved up — not back — the local release of Santiago Segura’s family comedy “Father There is Only One 2,” the country’s biggest potential national blockbuster for 2020. Originally scheduled to open in Spanish theaters on Aug. 7, the sequel to the

Netflix has boarded “O2,” a French survival thriller directed by Alexandre Aja, whose credits include “Crawl,” “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Piranha 3D.” The film, which marks the return of Aja to a French-speaking project after a 15-year career in the U.S., is produced by Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua and Noëmie Devide for Getaway Films.

China has struggled to get viewers back into cinemas this week, but the Shanghai Intl. Film Festival (SIFF) has found a way to break through: screen all eight of the “Harry Potter” franchise films in a row, with limited seating due to COVID-19 distancing measures, and watch the public duke it out for the privilege

Imax China, the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of Imax, has warned that it expects a net loss between $34 and $36 million for the first half of the year, as cinema closures in the country due to COVID-19 have slammed exhibition firms. The 2020 figures stand in contrast to a net profit of $24 million in

David France, the director of “Welcome to Chechnya,” can’t say for sure that his documentary played a role in pushing the U.S. government to place sanctions on the country’s leader, but it certainly looks that way. The film, about the Chechen government’s sanctioned arrests and torture of LGBTQ people in the autonomous Russian region, premiered

Streaming giant Netflix has set an Oct. 16 launch date for Aaron Sorkin’s star-studded political drama “The Trial of the Chicago 7” — three weeks before the national election. Netflix closed the deal on July 1 with Cross Creek Pictures for the drama, which recaps the trial that followed what were intended to be peaceful

Amber Heard, giving evidence Wednesday at London’s Royal Courts of Justice on the 12th day of Johnny Depp’s libel trial against the publisher of The Sun newspaper, alleged Depp headbutted her the night before she appeared on James Corden’s “The Late Late Show” in December 2015. Depp is suing News Group Newspapers and journalist Dan

The director of a 15-year-old animal rights documentary at the center of a baffling hostage situation in Ukraine has condemned the incident, saying, “We do not cause terror to awaken people to terror.” Director Shaun Monson’s comments came after an armed man in Ukraine, identified as 44-year-old Maksim Krivosh, held 13 people hostage on Tuesday,

The makers of “Citizen Penn,” a documentary about actor Sean Penn’s volunteer work in Haiti, have updated their film to include footage of the Oscar-winner’s efforts to expand access to COVID-19 testing. Over the past few months, director Don Hardy and producer Shawn Dailey have followed Penn as he worked with his non-profit organization CORE

San Diego Comic-Con may be going digital, but the lineup still offers a wide array of panels and conversations. With four days of content, Variety breaks down a list of this year’s most notable, anticipated and exciting panels. Star Trek The “Star Trek Universe” panel begins Thursday at 10 A.M. Executive producers Alex Kurtzman and

The pandemic has made desperadoes of all of us. There’s a strange kind of helplessness that sets in as home-bound film fans search for a decent movie to watch. Mind you, the medium has existed for more than a century, and its classics have never been more available than they are now. But unless you

Annie Ross, the legendary Jazz singer who was part of the trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross died in the early morning hours of July 22 at her home in New York City. She was 89. Ross’ former manager, Jim Coleman, confirmed the cause of death to be emphysema and heart disease. Her nephew Domenick Allen

Black makeup artist Denise Tunnell has over 84 credits to her name. Her films include, “Mean Girls 2,” “Stomp the Yard,” “The Notebook,” “Furious 7” and most recently, Netflix’s “Sweet Magnolias.”  Despite that body of work, Tunnell is still asked on job interviews, “What White actors have you done?”  She would rather be asked, “Can

Marie Curie’s barrier-breaking work as a physicist and chemist has inspired countless movies, plays and books over the years. But Marjane Satrapi, the director of “Radioactive,” a new film about Curie’s life and career, wasn’t interested in telling a conventional story of birth-to-death hagiography.  Satrapi, Oscar nominated for her 2007 animated film “Persepolis,” has made a movie

London-based financier and producer Anton has tapped Cecile Gaget, a well-respected French film executive, as president of international production and distribution. Gaget, who will start at Anton on Oct. 1, has been a key executive at Gaumont for over a decade and has been a driving force behind the French studio’s international distribution and acquisitions.

British Hollywood director Simon West has been ordered by a Beijing tribunal to return $200,000 in directors fees to Chinese firm Hongmaisui HMS Entertainment in a legal dispute over an unmade 2014 film. HMS filed the case with the Beijing Arbitration Commission back in 2016, after the production was derailed by difficulties in procuring a

Orange Studio has boarded “Tanzanite,” a female-centric thriller from Swiss-Rwandan filmmaker Kantarama Gahigiri, Variety has learned exclusively. “Tanzanite” takes place in the year 2045 in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, a lawless city where temperatures have become dangerously high and the government has imposed a curfew to tame brewing unrest. One day, a bright and feisty 11-year-old

Members of the Writers Guild of America West saw their earnings grow a healthy 3.1% to $1.68 billion last year, thanks to gains in television and digital platforms. The guild’s newly released annual report notes that the number of writers working in feature films rose 4% last year compared to 2017, while the level of

When you look at the photographs of Helmut Newton, with their spectacularly cold and severe Amazon-women-on-the-moon erotic shock value, and you try to imagine the man behind the camera (it’s sort of hard not to), you tend to picture him as a figure every bit as kinky and forbidding as the outrageous things he’s photographing.

Beijing is set to reopen cinemas again in its “low-risk areas” on Friday, July 24, officials said, but attendance will be capped at 30% and no concessions sold. As of Tuesday afternoon, there had been no new local confirmed cases in the capital for 15 consecutive days, meaning that all parts of the capital are

Ideally timed to draw domestic audiences back into Czech cinemas, loosely historical local-hero biopic “Havel” doesn’t let pesky facts get in the way of a good story. Multihyphenate Slávek Horák takes creative license with certain facts to stress the irony and absurdity of Václav Havel’s metamorphosis from celebrated playwright to banned and jailed human rights

An armed man in Ukraine held 13 people hostage and demanded the country’s president publicly endorse a Joaquin Phoenix film before he’d free them. According to The New York Times, a standoff between the hostage taker, identified as Maksim Krivosh, and the police lasted nearly 12 hours. One of the man’s demands was that President

“Pitch Perfect” star Anna Camp revealed she had coronavirus earlier this year, opened up about her symptoms and urged people to wear face masks. In an Instagram post on Tuesday, the actor opened up about how she contracted the virus after not wearing a mask “one time” as businesses and public places began reopening.   “I

Charlize Theron is gobsmacked. Even she can’t wrap her mind around Netflix’s prediction that her new movie “The Old Guard,” Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Netflix adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name, will reach out 72 million households in its first four weeks. “It’s pretty nutty, right?” says Charlize Theron, who stars as the leader

Amber Heard alleged in court on Tuesday that Johnny Depp beat her up on her 30th birthday. She was giving evidence on the 11th day of Depp’s libel trial against the publisher of The Sun newspaper, which is taking place at London’s Royal Courts of Justice. Depp is suing News Group Newspapers and journalist Dan

Michael Franklin, who used to serve as the top executive at the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America West, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 96. Franklin served at executive director for the WGA West for two decades before becoming the first national executive director of the DGA in 1978.

It’s hard to believe it, but “Clueless,” the seminal comedy that perfectly captured teenage life, has just turned 25, making it several years removed from high school graduation. In the subsequent two and a half decades, “Clueless” has achieved near classic status, but writer and director Amy Heckerling still remembers the many times producers and

“Benjamin” opens on a film within a film, the long-awaited sophomore feature by thirtysomething Irish director Benjamin Oliver (Colin Morgan), whose once-clamorous career buzz has slowed to a murmur. The scene we’re shown looks promising enough: a tartly worded lovers’ argument between two men, one played by Benjamin himself, diffidently explaining his existential struggles with