Entertainment News Boom

As well as providing a showcase for international films, the Berlinale is also a platform for German cinema. There are more than 130 German films and co-productions screening across the festival and the European Film Market. Pre-pandemic, in 2019, 237 German films were produced a year, but only 10 to 20 a year perform well

Chiara Bellosi, whose first work, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin’s Generation 14plus section in 2020, is back with “Swing Ride” (“Calcinculo”) about an overweight 15-year-old named Benedetta pining for attention in an Italian province where she falls in love with the skinny non-binary Amanda. A key difference between the two films is that while “Ordinary Justice,”

Fresh from appearing in Netflix hit Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” Mark Rylance’s latest big screen outing is “The Outfit,” in which he stars as Leonard, a 1950s tailor. It is a role that could not be more dissimilar to the fictional megalomaniac billionaire Peter Isherwell, whom Rylance plays in McKay’s disaster movie. Written and

Acclaimed Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain, known for her powerful women-centric films, has a new project participating in the Berlinale Co-Production Market and is launching a female filmmaker grant. Her Berlinale co-production market project, “The Difficult Bride,” follows Novera, a bride-to-be in present-day Dhaka who is in love with the groom and the idea of a

Germany’s Sola Media has closed a wave of international sales for the animated feature “Finnick,” produced by Riki Group, which will be released by Sony Pictures Russia in Russia and CIS on March 24. The CGI-animated comedy follows the adventures of 13-year-old Christine, who befriends the young prankster Finnick – one of the furry and

TrustNordisk has closed a flurry of sales on a pair of 3D-animated family features, “Little Allan — The Human Antenna” and “Just Super,” underscoring the market appeal of independent youth-skewing movies. “Little Allan – The Human Antenna” marks Danish film Amalie Naesby Fick’s follow up to her commercially successful debut “The Incredible Story of The

RAI Com is launching sales at the online EFM on Giuseppe Piccioni’s Fascist-era drama ‘L’Ombra del giorno,” starring Italian A-lister Riccardo Scamarcio (“Three Floors”) and Benedetta Porcaroli (“Baby,” “The Catholic School”). Pic, which Scamarcio produced, is a love story with a thriller twist set in 1938, two years before Italy entered World War II. It

MK2 Films, the banner behind Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” has boarded “Love Life,” the anticipated next film of laureled Japanese director Koji Fukada. Fukada’s credits include the 2016 movie “Harmonium” which won the jury prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, as well as “A Girl Missing” which played at Toronto. His

Adding to its notable lineup in Latin American movies, Paris-based sales agent MPM Premium has taken international sales rights to “Fogaréu,” from writer-director Flávia Neves, part of Brazil’s new wave of female filmmakers, which is one of the most exciting developments the country’s cinema currently has going for it. MPM Premium is introducing the film at

Ahead of Sunday’s world premiere of documentary “1341 Frames of Love and War,” which plays in Berlinale Special, Variety spoke to the film’s writer-director Ran Tal, and Israeli war photographer Micha Bar-Am, who is the subject of the film. In some ways “Frames” continues Tal’s interest in Israeli history evident in his previous work, “What

Shortlisted for the Academy Awards in the international feature film category, Fernando León de Aranoa’s “The Good Boss” capped a record 20 Spanish Academy Goya nominations by scoring best picture and actor for Javier Bardem at Saturday’s Goya prize ceremony.  The prizes marked both Leon and Bardem’s seventh Goya wins. Produced by El Reposado and The

“Fire” begins in water: a wide, rippling expanse of Mediterranean blue under a cloudless sky, displaced and disrupted by two whirling human bodies. Sara (Juliette Binoche) and Jean (Vincent Lindon) tussle in the otherwise empty ocean as though they’ve just discovered weightlessness, while Eric Gautier’s camera lingers on skin touching skin under the shimmer. The

Emma Thompson says the physicality of her performance in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” pushed her into uncharted waters as an actor learning to accept her body on screen. In the Sundance-premiering movie, which enjoys its European bow at the Berlinale on Saturday night, the British actor plays widow and former teacher Nancy, who

Let’s start with something most of us can agree on: Jimmy Kimmel, who I’m a fan of, is probably not the ideal messenger for how to fix the Oscars, if indeed they need fixing. Kimmel hosted the Academy Awards in 2017, and did a lively enough job of it that he was asked back to

Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier’s documentary “Dreaming Walls,” about the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York and its controversial renovation, has unveiled a trailer. The film world premieres in the Panorama section of the Berlinale on Saturday. The Chelsea Hotel, an icon of 1960s counterculture, was a haven for famous artists and intellectuals including

Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient”) and Vincent Lindon (“Titane”) who co-starred for the first time together in Claire Denis’ “Both Sides of the Blade” explained the emotionally draining experience of making the film at the Berlinale press conference. The highly anticipated film, which was acquired by IFC Films ahead of the festival, is world premiering

When Taiwan auteur Chung Mong-hong’s acclaimed drama “A Sun” became a hit among film critics and film buffs from around the world after Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge named it the best film of 2020, it had reignited the hope and expectations of the island’s cinematic offerings. The buzz and excitement were seen as

The title, you might not be surprised to hear, is ironic: In Rithy Panh’s frenetic, splenetic new hybrid essay film, everything will most assuredly not be OK. Humans, with our immense capacity for microscopic and macroscopic cruelty, will not be OK. Animals, even if they manage to turn the tables on us, will also not

Tokyo has been the nerve center of Japan’s movie industry for more than a century. Kyoto, the country’s ancient capital, has a proud filmmaking tradition, especially for samurai period films, but all the major film companies — Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Nikkatsu and Kadokawa — are headquartered in Tokyo and operate studios in either Tokyo or

In the early days of what we used to call “coronavirus” in March 2020, before we all became budding epidemiologists, people flocked to Steven Soderbergh’s eerily prophetic 2011 drama “Contagion” on streaming services. Within a month or so, the movie was propelled from the 270th slot to the second most watched film in the Warner

Producer Shrihari Sathe of New York-based production company Dialectic is enjoying the best time of his life, with no less than three of his projects, each completely different in style, genre and tone, being selected at A-list festivals. The latest career high for Sathe began with Bangladeshi filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s continent-hopping, multilingual identity tale