Play video content @LionsShareNews Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer is taking his L in court in stride — saying he’s not leaving the band, and even though he won’t be on the drums … he’ll be front and center for their Friday night gig. Joey was out Thursday night at a pre-Grammy party in WeHo where
Aubrey Plaza gives a go-for-broke performance in “Black Bear,” a galvanizing and serpentine thriller about a weekend getaway that goes dangerously off the rails. The film premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday and Plaza’s work is a million miles removed from April Ludgate, the deadpan and apathetic intern from “Parks and Recreation” that
STX’s Matthew McConaughey crime comedy “The Gentlemen” has opened with a moderate $725,000 at 1,885 North American locations on Thursday night. Horror thriller “The Turning” launched with $425,000 at 2,200 sites on Thursday night. The movie, based on Henry James’ 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw,” stars Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard and Brooklynn Prince.
Elyse Steinberg, one of the co-directors of the new documentary “The Fight,” was inspired to learn more about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shortly after Donald Trump moved into in the White House. “Seven days into Trump’s presidency,” she recalls, after the travel ban in Muslim-majority countries was issued in January 2017, “I joined
TMZ/Paramount Pictures Try not to choke on the irony, but the real-life ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ — who infamously fleeced investors for roughly $200 million — is now suing the film’s producers, claiming they lied and screwed HIM over. Jordan Belfort is going after Red Granite Pictures and its CEO, Riza Aziz, for fraud …
In simpler times, an artist could see album sales spike to over 500,000 in the days after a Grammy Awards broadcast appearance. That was Santana’s experience in 2000. Following a performance on the show and eight Grammy wins, “Supernatural” flew off the shelves — a gold certification from one key look. Today, that seems downright
There’s an exceptional level of craftsmanship among this year’s nominees for the Cinema Audio Society Awards, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments in sound mixing, a collaborative discipline that requires sound editors, re-recording mixers, Foley and ADR artistry to work together to create a harmonious finished product. The categories considered are: live action, animated and documentary features,
Gaumont, the once thriving French studio behind “The Intouchables” and “Narcos,” is set to rejig its film and TV strategy as it anticipates heavy losses in 2019. Variety can reveal that the company has all but shut down its TV distribution operations in the U.S., recently axing 12 employees, including Vanessa Shapiro, president of worldwide
After opening its doors in Paris last week, Netflix is setting up an office in Rome, Variety can reveal. The streaming giant has confirmed that it will move its Italian team, which is now based in Amsterdam, to new offices in the Italian capital, where they are currently seeking a space. The process will take
January 24, 2020 3:22AM PT Reel Suspects has acquired international sales rights to Caru Alves de Souza’s coming-of-age tale “My Name is Baghdad,” which will world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in the Generation 14 section. The film was produced by Manjericão Filmes and Tangerina Entretenimento. It follows a 17-year-old female skater named Baghdad
The 70th edition of the Berlinale will open with Philippe Falardeau’s anticipated “My Salinger Year,” headlined by a powerful female duo, Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley. Set in New York’s literary world in the 90’s, the coming-of-age-story is based on Joanna Rakoff’s international bestseller and follows Joanna (Qualley), who leaves graduate school to pursue her
The year is 1989 and New Jack Swing is about to push black culture from the margins to the mainstream. The question for the black employees of Culture, the music TV station at the center of writer-director Justin Simien’s delightfully macabre horror-dramedy “Bad Hair,” is what image do they — and their white executive Grant
Fly-on-the-wall portraits of pop-music stars used to be dominated by, you know, pop music. The life and personality and woe-is-me-I’m-caught-in-the-media-fishbowl spectacle of the star herself was part of the equation, yet all that stuff had a way of dancing around the edges. Now, though, it’s front and center. In “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana,” we catch
Deeply personal but indulgently campy, Justin Simien’s Sundance opener “Bad Hair” is a genre-blending horror show that the director said serves as a tribute to the struggles of black women. The mind behind “Dear White People” staged the world premiere for the project at Park City’s Ray Theater on Thursday night, before a cast that
At the outset of the first screening of the documentary “Miss Americana” Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival, it was clear at the outset that it was not necessarily Taylor Swift’s core audience filling the Eccles Theater for the premiere. The opening scene has Swift trying to write a song at the piano while
China closed swathes of cinemas on Friday in response to the outbreak of novel coronavirus, which started in the city of Wuhan and has now killed 26 people. The closures come a day after the distributors and producers of the seven major blockbusters that had expected to launch from Jan. 25 cancelled their films’ releases.
January 23, 2020 10:05PM PT Shooting of Disney Plus’s Obi-Wan Kenobi has been pushed to next year following the news that show’s writer is being replaced. “I think we start shooting early next year as opposed to summer this year,” Ewan McGregor, who will reprise his role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the series, told Variety
Check out the official Irresistible trailer starring Steve Carell! Let us know what you think in the comments below. ► Sign up for a Fandango FanAlert for Irresistible: [fandangomoviepage]?cmp=MCYT_YouTube_Desc Want to be notified of all the latest movie trailers? Subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to stay up to date. US Release
Chinese film production and online group Huanxi Media has cancelled plans for the theatrical release of its blockbuster Chinese New Year film “Lost in Russia” and will release it online for free instead. The move is both a reaction to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that has caused disruption and panic throughout China, and as the
In the new Taylor Swift documentary, “Miss Americana,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Thursday night, there’s a montage of derogatory commentary about the singer that has appeared on cable shows over the years. One of the less nasty remarks: “She’s too skinny. It bothers me.” As it turns out, it eventually bothered Swift,
Incredible. That’s the word that comes to mind with Benjamin Ree’s “The Painter and the Thief,” a stranger-than-fiction friendship story in which vérité techniques produce unbelievable results. I don’t mean to imply that this astonishing documentary isn’t truthful. Rather, I’m in awe of how things played out, and fully aware that there was a certain
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the “Station 19″/”Grey’s Anatomy” crossover that aired Jan. 23. “Station 19” and “Grey’s Anatomy” kicked off the start of their official combined universe with a two-hour block that began with the third season premiere of the former Shondaland series. In the episode entitled “I
Eleven-year-old Senegalese immigrant Amy (Fathia Youssouf) reckons there are two ways to be a woman. Amy could mimic her mom (Maïmouna Gueye), a dutiful drudge with three kids and a husband who’s just announced he’s bringing home a second wife. Or she could copy the “Cuties,” a quartet of brazen girls who wear tube tops
January 23, 2020 7:50PM PT “The Cost of Silence,” a new documentary about the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, doesn’t just chronicle the worst oil drilling disaster in history. It looks at the devastating impact that the use of chemicals called “dispersants” had on Gulf Coast families. It turns out the so-called cleanup
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Patty,” the penultimate episode of “The Good Place.” The titular good place on Mike Schur’s philosophical comedy “The Good Place” isn’t a literal place at all but instead a state of mind. Sure, after four seasons (50 episodes) the characters on the show did
Discovery Networks, which last month unveiled a new business model that would have all but assured series composers a drastic income drop, has scuttled that plan in response to outrage expressed by the media music community. This means that the shows on Discovery, Animal Planet, HGTV, Food Network and other Discovery-owned platforms, will continue to
January 23, 2020 6:15PM PT If ‘Blindspotting’ was Carlos López Estrada’s ode to Oakland, then this inspirational spoken-word ensemble project is his hallelujah to L.A. “Use your words.” I remember one of my sheroes saying that to a stammering 4-year-old decades ago. Here was a woman who’d dedicated her life to preschool education, whom I
If “Crip Camp” strikes you as a politically incorrect name for a movie about a summer camp where kids on crutches, in wheelchairs, and otherwise living with disabilities found it possible to feel included rather than ostracized, consider this: The irreverent, stereotype-busting documentary was co-directed by Berkeley-based sound designer Jim LeBrecht, a spina bifida survivor
In the wake of former Recording Academy chief Neil Portnow’s ill-spoken 2018 comment that female musicians and executives needed to “step up” in order to advance in the music industry, the organization formed a Task Force for Diversity and Inclusion, headed by Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff Tina Tchen, to identify and execute those
In today’s film news roundup, a Mickey Rourke crime drama will premiere in Portugal, a film about the Purdue Pharma scandal is in the works and the documentary “After Parkland” will be shown at 100 locations on the second anniversary of the Parkland shootings. FESTIVAL OPENER The world premiere of Mickey Rourke’s crime drama “Adverse”