The Montreux Jazz Festival today announced the exclusive digital release of more than 50 legendary concerts from its 54-year history, including James Brown, Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Run-DMC, the Raconteurs, Alanis Morissette, Phil Collins, Wu-Tang Clan, Korn, The Raconteurs and many more. The performances are available to stream in full free of charge (for the first month) via Stingray Qello. View the concerts
We love movies about women in peril. From “Gaslight” to “King Kong” to Jennifer Lopez with a ridiculous haircut in “Enough,” audiences will almost always pay to watch a woman stare helplessly as a doorknob slowly turns, or hold her breath as a shadow looms next to where she is hiding. But as much as
March 26, 2020 11:02AM PT Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” will begin streaming on Hulu on Friday, March 27, the streamer announced. Neon and Hulu acquired the movie out of the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it premiered in competition and won the Queer Palm and best screenplay. In the United
The cameras may have stopped rolling two weeks ago, but Hollywood’s headaches only stand to intensify in the coming weeks and months as the industry tentatively looks ahead to the day when studios will be back in business. From “The Matrix 4” to “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” the coronavirus pandemic has
While speculation mounts about whether the Cannes Film Festival will be postponed to late June, organizers addressed frequently asked questions, such as why it chose to delay the event rather than cancel it. The festival said it plays a key role in the economy of world cinema and “when the decision to cancel the event
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Unorthodox,” steaming now on Netflix. There’s a scene in Netflix’s limited series “Unorthodox,” which is streaming now, in which its then-17-year-old protagonist, Esther “Esty” Shapiro, a young Jewish woman from the Satmar Hassidic sect in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, stares deep into the mirror, sobbing. Esty has
Contrasting human paradoxes and complexities against the cold rationality of Scandinavian civic institutions, the Danish series “Cry Wolf” presents a searing social drama built from an initially ambiguous premise. Presented as part of Series Mania’s Buyer’s Showcase after having been selected for the festival’s international competition, the DR Drama-produced series tracks the cascading aftershocks once
March 26, 2020 10:52AM PT Up and coming young actor and rock ‘n’ roll scion James Jagger — he’s the son of model Jerry Hall, now married to Rupert Murdoch, and the fourth of knighted Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger’s eight children — has sold his starter bungalow in L.A.’s boho-trendy Silver Lake area for
tDriven by excellent reviews, steady word-of-mouth and an energetic marketing campaign, Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” was, by many measures, 2019’s most surprising success story. The class-conscious South Korean thriller earned more than $50 million at the U.S. box office and became the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for best picture. As the film
London-based documentary distributor Dogwoof has acquired dog documentary “Stray,” which was slated to bow at April’s now-postponed Tribeca Film Festival. The doc specialist has picked up world rights to the Turkey-set film, which also marks Dogwoof’s first dog-centric sales documentary. The doc takes a canine’s eye-view of the streets of Istanbul, and follows three dogs
The U.K. has finally announced an economic relief package for freelancers not in employment after much of the country’s creative industries shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced a new self-employed income support scheme on Thursday. Self-employed individuals can claim 80% of their average income over the last three
The TV station group Tegna has been the subject of acquisition rumors for nearly a year. Finally, bids started to surface earlier this month that pegged the company’s market value at about $8.5 billion. But in the space of a week, the assets up for grabs at Tegna have taken on a very different kind
Two of Latin America’s most energetic producers, Mexico’s Mónica Lozano and Argentina’s Paolo Suárez, are teaming to adapt Argentine bestseller “Záfiros en la Piel,” aiming to shoot in Mexico, in further signs of a fast-building pan-Latin American TV production scene. Also president of México’s producers assn., Lozano’s credits include milestone Mexican movies such as Academy
German production companies Pantaleon Films and Carte Blanche Intl. are separately developing two series projects from writer Katja Eichinger that delve into the Hamburg underworld and the city’s unique high security prison. Pantaleon, part of actor-director Matthias Schweighöfer’s Pantaflix AG entertainment group, has optioned Eichinger’s “Santa Fu,” about life in Hamburg’s notorious Justizvollzugsanstalt Fuhlsbüttel prison,
Netflix’s “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker,” the story of America’s first self-made female millionaire, takes place between 1908 and 1918. But the music, instead of focusing on the early jazz that might be expected, runs the gamut from ragtime to hip-hop. “Madam C.J. Walker is a central, seminal historical figure
Ariyon Bakare had his carry-on luggage packed and ready to travel from his London home to Prague where the second season of Amazon Prime TV show “Carnival Row” is filming. Then, the actor, who plays Darius, received the call that filming had abruptly stopped because of COVID-19. “I have no idea when we will start
ESPN’s newsmagazine “E: 60” led all nominations (with 10) for the 41st Annual Sports Emmy Awards, as announced on Thursday by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The Sports Emmys, originally scheduled for April 28 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall, has been postponed due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic,
Unprecedented times call for innovative measures and U.K. public service broadcasters are exploring a range of means to keep a nation in lockdown engaged. The BBC’s extremely popular “The Graham Norton Show,” for example, will be filmed at the host’s (pictured) home for the first time in its 13-year history with virtual guests, rather than
Actor Mark Blum, who appeared in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” “Crocodile Dundee” and the TV series “You,” has died due to complications from coronavirus. He was 69. The Playwrights Horizons theater group and SAG-AFTRA executive vice president Rebecca Damon confirmed the news on Thursday. It is with such deep sorrow that I’m writing to share the news
Dominic “DJ” Jordan and Jimmy “Jimmy G” Giannos, the Grammy-nominated production partners collectively known as the Audibles, joke that they’re basically the same person. And they’re certainly in agreement that “Intentions,” their latest collaboration with Justin Bieber, is perfect for these uncertain times. Not coincidentally, it’s also their first top 10 single. “We were just trying
Ellen Page is now calling the shots from behind the camera. The “X-Men” star makes her directorial debut with “There’s Something in the Water,” the new Netflix documentary she co-directed with Ian Daniel about the impact of environmental racism on marginalized communities in her native Canada. “Environmental racism is essentially the disproportionate placement of landfills,
Today, the Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation announced that it will be donating $10 million to help those affected by the virus. The funds will be split across different causes, including the Emergency Assistance Foundation, the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, and more. “Now more than ever, in this time of need, supporting each
Dish Network’s over-the-top Sling TV service is offering free access to its 45-channel live TV bundle for 14 days. The company is positioning the move as a “public service” as millions of Americans are quarantined at home during the COVID-19 crisis. From March 26 to April 5, U.S. consumers who are not current customers of
The word “viral” has new meaning in the age of coronavirus, but not before DJ iMarkKeyz received the biggest look of his career: a remix of Cardi B’s coronavirus rant that went, well, you know. Born and raised in Brooklyn, iMarkKeyz, whose real name is Brandon Davidson, is a local DJ and producer well-known for remixing
The “ACM Presents: Our Country” special that was recently slated to fill in for the postponed ACM Awards next month now has a packed roster of participating country (and a few non-country) artists. The Academy of Country Music and Dick Clark Productions announced more than two dozen acts who’ll participate in the show April 5,
With U.S. theaters closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Disney is releasing Harrison Ford’s “The Call of the Wild” early on digital on March 27. The studio also announced that “Downhill,” a black comedy from Searchlight starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus, will also be available for an early digital release on March 27.
Viaplay, the thriving streaming service owned by the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT Group), is set to launch in Iceland on April 1. Viaplay is already a leading streamer in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. With the upcoming roll-out in Iceland, the service will available in all five Nordic countries. The Viaplay series and movies package
March 26, 2020 2:24AM PT U.K. theater chain Cineworld Group has decided not to go ahead with the planned redundancies first announced last week after all their sites, including Picturehouse screens, shuttered due to the coronavirus crisis. In an internal memo to staff circulated Wednesday night and seen by Variety, Cineworld CEO Mooky Greidinger wrote:
China has re-opened a portion of its cinemas as it emerges from its coronavirus shutdown. But they’re far from back to business as usual. After nearly 60 days of closures, more than 500 cinemas — around 5% of China’s total — re-opened last weekend. Yet without exciting product yet to push, they remain comically empty.
A collaborative series charting Australians’ experiences of the chaos and confusion unleashed by Covid-19 has been unveiled as the first original content production at documentary-specialist streaming platform iwonder. “Coronavirus & Me” will make use of user-generated-content submissions, edited together to make short documentaries. These will evolve in real-time to reveal how society is adapting to