Whatever spell conjured by the witchy Owens sisters, played onscreen by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in two “Practical Magic” movies, wasn’t powerful enough to lure audiences to theaters. “Practical Magic 2” disappointed in its box office debut with $30 million from 4,146
Nicholas Weinstock, executive producer of the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” has boarded “Tongue,” an Indian fantasy-horror feature written and directed by Krishnarjun Bhattacharya and starring Sayani Gupta. Weinstock produces through his banner Invention Studios alongside Divya
Across the harrowing financial realities of late capitalism, an indisputable global fact is the injustices faced by countless workers who deliver everything we have come to rely on, from food orders to Amazon purchases. Despite their hard work under unideal, sometimes even
Cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz has been dealing with patchy internet over the past few days. He and his crew have been sailing on the Baltic Sea and have finally docked at an undisclosed location in northeastern Poland. In a few weeks, Pietkiewicz will attend the Toronto
Twenty-three years after the United States invaded Iraq, the American public now knows that despite his horrific reign and brutal dictatorship, Saddam Hussein never had any weapons of mass destruction. Based on former CIA analyst John Nixon’s 2016 memoir “Debriefing the
Iranian director Ali Asgari has no desire to repeat clichés about great expectations for things to come. “In Iran, we don’t have high hopes for the future anymore,” he states. “We’ve been waiting for good news for so many years, and it never came. But I do believe in these
Star turns in 'Hit & Run,' 'From' and 'The Betrayers' thriller this year at the Toronto Film Festival have got Ohm onto everyone's call sheets in Canada.
Helen Mirren, Laura Linney, Rhys Ifans, Erin Doherty and James McAvoy star in three of the biggest U.K. titles world premiering at Toronto and making Variety’s 2026 selection of 20 International Titles to Track at this year’s Toronto.Jodie Comer sings (very creditably Variety
Twenty-five-year-old newcomer Adia never really imagined becoming a movie star. Growing up, she was focused on becoming a professional dancer before a hip injury derailed that dream. That’s when the high school senior discovered acting. “I decided to take an acting class, just
Marie Clements' drama about a single mother and three daughters separated by tragedy after resettling for new lives in 1950s Los Angeles will world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
Netflix’s “Scooby-Doo: Origins” has wrapped production, the company announced Sunday. The live-action series is set for a global release on the streamer in 2027. Per the series’ official logline, “Scooby-Doo: Origins” is a “modern reimagining of the iconic mystery-solving
From Palestinian-focused Watermelon Pictures to new Jewish financing platform Shooq, a parallel industry is forming around the films the majors won't touch.
Melissa Rivers is returning to the red carpet. Fashion expert and author Rivers — who rose to fame reporting outside awards-shows with her late mother, the comedian Joan Rivers — will be joining Variety co-president and co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh and CNN correspondent
British writer-director Lakeem Rose, is developing his feature debut, a contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” with Canadian producers Plato Fountidakis and Paul Rapovski and Hong Kong-based producer and casting director Mike Leeder. In
Jane Curtin and Ella Ballentine also feature in Ron Murphy's debut feature set for a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
The ‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ star has nabbed the lead in the indie, written and directed by her mother Rana Strazza, which is being shopped to international buyers at TIFF: The Market.
The Italian filmmaker’s second narrative feature had a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival as part of the Platform competition.
Variety and Chanel’s annual Women in Film dinner was the place to see and be chic at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday night. The hottest invite of the festival gathered prominent women and nonbinary filmmakers, where the legendary fashion house co-hosted an evening to
In “The Stunt Driver,” Jay Baruchel reteams with his “Goon” director Michael Dowse and takes on a showy lead part as stunt driver Ken Carter, who’s best remembered for a jump he didn’t make: a proposed mile-long leap over the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered car. The five
The Belgian director of 'Bullhead' and 'The Drop' on 'Le Faux Soir,' his TIFF-bound period comedy thriller about the Resistance journalists who hijacked Belgium's biggest newspaper and printed a satirical fake edition mocking the Nazis.
“Fashion and entertainment have been overlapping for so long, it only makes sense that we start to interconnect and join each other’s worlds,” Willy Chavarria tells Variety. The Mexican American designer puts that philosophy into practice with “El Puente Eterno,” Tequila Don
Toward the end of Rebel Wilson’s “Girl Group,” a fizzy, gaudy clone of “Pitch Perfect” sculpted from the mentor formula of “Bad News Bears,” the movie spirals into an interminable sequence of pop music performances. The song-and-dance numbers are so awkwardly endless that they
Scottish writer-director Tom Nicoll is unveling at Toronto his buzzy debut “Salvation.” It tracks an aspiring online life coach whose attempt to reinvent himself and then sell that transformation to others pulls him in increasingly desperate directions. The psychological and
Seven years after “Moving On,” Korean filmmaker Yoon Dan-bi returns with “The World Before,” a coming-of-age film about desire and first love. Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s Toronto Film Festival Platform world premiere, Yoon discusses how capturing the authenticity
In “Masc,” director Bertil Nilsson pulls off a nifty trick: He observes an observer. Usually a film’s protagonist has the dominant POV, but here, Robin (Joshua Griffin) is trying to find his personality by observing other men in his orbit. He almost never initiates the action
“Happily Ever After,” the follow-up feature from Taiwanese director Feng-i Fiona Roan, is bowing in the Toronto Film Festival’s Special Presentations lineup, arriving amid heightened attention following the success of her acclaimed debut, “American Girl.” “American Girl”
Abinash Bikram Shah’s “Elephants in the Fog” has been sold to distributors across 10 territories, Best Friend Forever has revealed, as the Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner plays at the Toronto Film Festival with Nepal’s Oscars international feature submission also
Reaping upbeat initial reviews, Italian film “Idda” had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the TIFF Platform competition, whose non-English language winner, starting this year, will be directly eligible for the Academy Award for Best
A crisscrossing family dramedy, Trudie Styler’s “Up Against It” features wonderful performances and intriguingly modern ideas, but it seldom coheres as comedy or drama. A tale of divorced parents, their respective partners and their ailing, precocious teen, this occasionally
The Guardian served as producer, and Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, on the documentary by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, which won a special Jury at the Venice Film Festival.
In the coming-of-age drama, the 12-year-old co-stars play aspiring manga artists whose rivalry blossoms into a defining friendship, brought to life via the director’s famously intuitive way with child actors.
International sales company Parallax Films has boarded “Aman,” writer-director Rahul Roye’s short film about a trans man who discovers he is pregnant on the eve of his gender-affirming surgery, for worldwide sales. The announcement comes ahead of the film’s world premiere in
Rafael Manuel’s “Filipiñana” has been chosen as the official entry from the Philippines in the international feature category at the 99th Academy Awards. It was selected from a shortlist of 8 films. The film is written and directed by Manuel and is distributed by Kino Lorber.
Like Peter Farrelly's earlier film 'Green Book,' this crowd-pleaser could seriously contend for TIFF's audience award en route to major Oscar noms (including best actor for Anthony Ippolito, who plays Sylvester Stallone).
Brendan Carr, the Trump-aligned Republican chairman of the FCC, accused James Talarico, a Texas Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, of running a “hoax” to garner attention and campaign donations by sitting for an interview with Jimmy Kimmel — which ABC put on YouTube instead
Roughly two-thirds through “Misty Green,” Rosalind Eleazar takes a breath and lets a rendition of “One Night Only,” from the musical “Dreamgirls,” rip. The characters around her go quiet, and the crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Chris Rock’s film made its
Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali finally made their “Blade” movie. On Saturday night, “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before its theatrical release on Sept. 25. Tariq’s film centers on Latif (Ali), a devout
The Roblox Innovation Awards (RIAs) unveiled its 2026 winners during a ceremony in San Jose Saturday with new title “Animal Hospital” taking home several top honors. Part of the 12th annual Roblox Developer Conference, this year’s RIAs were hosted by Roblox’s head of the
"Misty Green" is an amazing slice of showbiz sociology, riveting in the details of what a contemporary Hollywood actress — even a successful one — is up against. Rock isn’t casting stones. The warped values he depicts are there in the industry and in Misty herself.
For a biographical drama to work, it’s not required that the central actor do a pinpoint uncanny, so-close-to- the-real-thing-you-might-think-it’s-the-real-thing impersonation of the person he’s playing. But Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky” may be a special case. It’s a movie
"It was a lot to take in because I'd spent over a year, by that point, studying him,” the actor said at THR‘s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose.
Yo Adrian, Rocky did it … again! Only this time, the famed character is at TIFF in biopic form, thanks to director Peter Farrelly, screenwriter Peter Gamble and a star-making turn from Anthony Ippolito, who portrays actor Sylvester Stallone in the story of his relentless
“Forever Is a Feeling,” Lucy Dacus promised in the romantic-sounding title of her 2025 solo album. Feelings are transitory things, of course, and some of the good ones must come to an end, which is why Dacus is commemorating the end of that era Sunday night with a show at the
A leaked report from the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation outlines devastating aftershocks that would follow if David Ellison pulled Paramount Skydance out of California. A copy of the report published by Politico reads, “At a minimum, relocating Paramount’s
The Oscar winner looked back on her career in the entertainment industry in conversation with Jennifer Aniston for Interview magazine.
Just when the victim/villain discourse about sleeper smash “Obsession” was finally beginning to die down, along comes “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” — another story of a young man’s desires getting violently over-satisfied — to start it all up again. Merging romantic comedy, body
U.S. President Donald Trump’s new hairstyle was heavily mocked in “Saturday Night Live U.K.’s” Weekend Update segment. “This week, President Trump stepped off Air Force One sporting a different hair color,” quipped co-anchor Ania Magliano. “He appears to be trialling a new
“It offered up an opportunity to engage and commit to the type of difficult I want to commit to," the Oscar winner said about the Bassam Tariq-directed film.
Jeff Goldblum kicked off his hosting duties on “Saturday Night Live U.K.” by employing his musical skills in a jazzy number about spending time in London. “Can you believe this is Saturday night, first of all?” Goldblum asked the live audience after making his grand entrance.
