Alice Stewart, a CNN political commentator and veteran political adviser who worked on several Republican presidential campaigns, has died. She was 58. Stewart’s body was found outdoors in a northern Virginia neighborhood early Saturday morning, CNN reported. Law enforcement
Premiering out of Critics’ Week in Cannes, Alexis Langlois’ debut feature “Queens of Drama” is a musical blast of queer culture euphoria, telling a decades-spanning, impossible love story between a pair of pop idols who begin as fans and then become lovers, who climb the charts
Cate Blanchett blew kisses to the Cannes Film Festival audience as her new film, “Rumours,” earned a four-minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The crowd welcomed the film’s dark humor, laughing throughout the entirety of the late-night screening.
“What you are about experience may or may not be real,” reads a caption on a TV that Justin Timberlake gazes upon during an introductory vignette for his Forget Tomorrow world tour. At Los Angeles’ Kia Forum on Friday night, the pop star existed in the throes of fantasy and
Barbra Fuller, who starred as the daughter Claudia on the long-running radio soap opera One Man’s Family, all while appearing in films for Republic Pictures and such TV shows as Adventures of Superman, has died. She was 102. Fuller, who lived in the Los Angeles area, died
Noemie Merlant’s sophomore feature “The Balconettes” plays as a raunchy horror-comedy with a greater social conscience. The film follows three roommates – an actress, played by Merlant, a camgirl played by “Dune: Part Two” breakout Souheila Yacoub and a frustrated writer played
“Emilia Pérez,” a Spanish-language musical drama starring Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón, has earned the biggest standing ovation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival so far. Gomez wiped away tears as the Palais clapped for a full nine minutes, accompanied by
Jacques Audiard returned to Cannes on Saturday night to introduce the world to Emilia Perez, which received a rapturous response from the audience, who gave it a nine-minute standing ovation. After Audiard took the mic to speak in French, the standing ovation resumed for
Neon has acquired the North American rights to “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. The thriller is set to premiere In Competition in Cannes on May 24, and marks Rasoulof’s first return to the Cannes Film Festival, after being barred from traveling. Neon
Alongside the hundreds of original movies being shopped up and down the Croisette during Cannes’ Marché du Film, the market for remakes — local-language adaptations of established hits — is quietly booming. We’re not only talking about the international-to-English remakes such
The “Mavka” franchise is just getting started. Ukraine’s FILM.UA Group is now developing a live-action film based on the character already spotlighted in “Mavka. The Forest Song,” Variety has found out. Shown in 148 countries, it has grossed over $21 million globally.
Casey Wilson and Adam Pally, who starred in the ABC sitcom “Happy Endings,” are launching an eponymous recap podcast. The joint endeavor is set to release May 21. Per the podcast’s logline: “Casey Wilson and Adam Pally sit down with the creators, cast and writers from ABC’s
Back in Cannes a year after presiding over the main Cannes jury, the two-time Palme d’or winner Ruben Öslund unveiled more details about his next mega-project, English-language “The Entertainment is Down,” which he said should be ready for Cannes 2026. The press conference,
Spanish director Jonás Trueba wants you to celebrate the endings, not just the beginnings. That includes the demise of a serious relationship, because Ale and Alex (Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz) have been together for 15 years. Now, they want only two things: to go their
Brazil’s Spcine, the city of São Paulo’s film-TV body, is launching the third edition of its cash rebate program, which prioritizes international projects looking to shoot in the vibrant city and state. Municipal support for the program has already been renewed, now totalling
SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains some spoilers. Like a rose blooming amid a minefield, it’s a miracle that Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” exists: a south-of-the-border pop opera about a most unlikely metamorphosis and the personal redemption it awakens in a
The film has been designed as a bad-trip psychodrama that’s also a high-camp Nicolas Cage freak-out. I only wish that "The Surfer," as directed by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Thomas Martin, had the filmmaking chops to match its what-is-reality? jokiness. The film is trying
MK2 Films has acquired worldwide rights, including France, to French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s films, including his landmark documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” which is inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. The deal was signed with Les Films Aleph.
The summer box office season mostly continues to underwhelm as writer-director John Krasinski‘s original family film IF — starring Ryan Reynolds and featuring an A-list voice cast — is opening well behind prerelease tracking even as it heads for a first-place finish. After
“Baby Reindeer,” the Netflix series that has taken the world by storm since dropping last month, boldly opens with the claim that “This is a true story.” (Unlike another Netflix series, “Inventing Anna,” which opens with the title card: “This whole story is completely true.
Raven Banner Entertainment has launched sales at the Cannes Film Festival’s market on the reboot of Roger Corman’s cult sword and sorcery film series, “Deathstalker,” which is currently shooting in Canada. Daniel Bernhardt (“John Wick,” “The Matrix Reloaded”) stars as the
British actor Janet Montgomery has landed a starring role as a young Faye Dunaway in Jonathan Baker’s supernatural love story “Fate,” a film that is shooting in Vancouver for Baker Entertainment. The film will toggle between a yesteryear version of the character (Montgomery)
Paramount’s family comedy “IF” is leading domestic charts in its opening after earning $10.3 million from 4,041 locations across Friday and preview screenings. But the John Krasinski-directed fantasy feature has decidedly fallen behind its projections heading into the weekend,
The Chinese title of Jia Zhangke’s mesmerizing “Caught by the Tides,” a masterfully poetic and pioneering fusion of the old and the new, can be translated in several ways. Jia himself suggests “The Drifting Generation,” but it can also mean “The Romantic Generation” with the
The entrance to the Palais in Cannes was closed briefly Saturday afternoon after a bomb scare due to a “suspicious” item. The Cannes press office confirmed that there was a suspicious package found on the street but not inside the Palais. Police officers shut down part of the
A day after his latest film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film has been announced. The director will helm Bugonia, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, who lead his latest movie Kinds of Kindness. The script from Will Tracy follows two
Yorgos Lanthimos can’t stop (won’t stop!) working with Oscar winner Emma Stone, casting the actress once again as leading lady for his next project “Bugonia.” The drama will also star Jesse Plemons who, along with Stone, appears in Lanthimos’ forthcoming “Kinds of Kindness.”
Universal chairman Donna Langley oversaw a record year for the studio last year, finishing No. 1 at the box office and closing out awards season with seven Oscars including best picture for Christopher Nolan’s billion dollar grosser Oppenheimer. Even with that level of success,
Paramount Global may be a direct competitor, but NBCUniversal Studio group chairman and chief content officer Donna Langley will be disappointed if the media giant goes away. “It’s sad,” Langley said at the Kering Women in Motion talk at the Cannes Film Festival, noting that a
Kirsten Dunst said she “sobbed like a happy child at Disneyland” when Ruben Östlund cast her to star in The Entertainment System Is Down, the Swedish director’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Triangle of Sadness. “Who doesn’t want to work with Ruben?” the Civil War
It’s one of those perfect Cannes mornings. The sun is shining, there’s a slight breeze off the sea and the streets are not yet stuffed with pedestrians hustling towards screenings or official festival business. Lucas Bravo matches the city’s calm energy when he emerges from a
Martin Moszkowicz, who recently segued from being CEO of leading German film and TV company Constantin Film to a producing role at the company, has been honored with the Carl Laemmle Producer Award. The award, presented by the Alliance of German Producers – Film & Television
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan – already behind “Vivarium” – returns to Cannes with “The Surfer.” Starring Nicolas Cage, it follows a man who just wants to surf on a beach next to his old childhood home in Australia. But he is not a local anymore and he will have to fight for
When people talk about the recent Spanish audiovisual boom, they often highlight as a key turning point the government’s identification of the industry as a “strategic” one. Gone are the days when naysayers jeered the subsidization of a snoozy cinema sector. Today, young people
The unstoppable Paul Schrader, the 77-year-old auteur who just brought his latest movie “Oh, Canada” to Cannes, has announced his next project. The director revealed he intends to start production this fall on “Non Compos Mentis,” a noir film he is currently writing. The title
Paul Schrader had a special job on the set of his latest film, “Oh, Canada”: drawing on the jockstrap that Jacob Elordi wears in one of the Vietnam War drama’s pivotal scenes. There’s a choice at the heart of “Oh, Canada,” when the fictional filmmaker Leonard Fife (played as a
Just over a decade before hitting this year’s Cannes Film Festival with the musical crime comedy Emilia Perez, Zoe Saldaña supported a different crime film on the Croisette. Guillaume Canet’s star-studded Blood Ties focused on Chris Pierzynski (Clive Owen) getting out of
Noomi Rapace is set to play Mother Teresa in a new film from Teona Strugar Mitevska, director of 2019’s God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya. Rapace will play the legendary Catholic saint in the biopic Mother, which will follow seven consecutive days at a pivotal moment in Mother
With Maite Alberdi, twice Oscar nominated for her last two docus, “The Eternal Memory” and “The Mole Agent,” and Tana Gilbert whose feature debut “Malqueridas” won the Grand Prize at Venice’s Critics’ Week, Chilean documentaries are having a banner year. Five documentaries
At this point, any actor signing on for a Yorgos Lanthimos film knows they wont be resting on their laurels. Literally. One of his trademarks is a kind of heightened physicality — whether its Rachel Weisz and Joe Alwyn twerking in “The Favourite,” Emma Stone “furious jumping”
Just eight months after filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone unveiled Poor Things at Venice, the duo are back on the festival circuit with Kinds of Kindness. The frequent collaborators faced the press at Cannes, where they tried to define the alchemy between their
The Cannes Film Festival not only means much choice in terms of films, but also in terms of where to go, what to do and what not to do on and around the famed Croisette. Alice Vail, director of acquisitions and development at Protagonist Pictures, has experience and insight
Unspooling May 18 as part of an overall Swiss Focus at the Marché du Film, Solothurn Film Festival Goes to Cannes marks the first collaboration between the long-standing Swiss festival and the Cannes market, but also a first for many of the talents and producers carefully
In this first look from “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare” — from the makers of slasher horror hit “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” — Martin Portlock plays an evil, murderous and disfigured version of the children’s character. The Jagged Edge Productions film — being sold by
In the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg, a futile tension exists between French and English speakers — doubly silly, since the country is officially bilingual. In his gently satirical “Universal Language,” writer-director Matthew Rankin imagines a rather fanciful
Brazilian social impact entertainment company Maria Farinha Films has taken a minority stake in Joanna Natasegara’s London-based production company Violet Films, which is known for high-profile docs such as “White Helmets,” “Virunga,” “The Edge of Democracy” and Prince Harry’s
Adria Arjona (“Andor,” “Hit Man”) and Edgar Ramirez, the Golden Globe-nominated actor of “American Crime Story” and “Carlos,” have been tapped to star in “El Sombreron,” a dystopian thriller from Jayro Bustamante, the acclaimed director of “La Llorona” (2019) and “Ixcanul”
Sudanese first-timer Mohamed Kordofani’s “Goodbye Julia,” a timely morality tale that takes place just before the 2011 secession of South Sudan, has won top awards for both fest feature film and best screenplay at the eighth edition of the Critics Awards for Arab Films that
Japanese director Hiroshi Okuyama is only 28 years old, but his feature filmmaking to date has been suffused by the desire to reach back into the past at the elusive sensibilities of youth. Okuyama announced himself as something of a prodigy — he writes, directs, edits and
The restored version of Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal’s 1976 masterpiece “Manthan” (“The Churning”) is screening at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cannes Classics strand. Shot by DoP Govind Nihalani in rural Gujarat, western India, the film is produced by 500,000 farmers who
