Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/15/2022 i Variety

It’s been 25 years since James Cameron directed one of the most epic blockbusters in Hollywood history. On Dec. 19, 1997, he released a little movie called “Titanic” in theaters. OK, it was a really big movie — with a $200 million budget (a record at the time), a blown summer release date and months of bad press. Back then, Leonardo DiCaprio’s most prominent credit was in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet,” and Kate Winslet wasn’t a household name. But as we all know, Cameron defied the odds and “Titanic” became a $2 billion blockbuster. It sailed on and on in multiplexes (and later on a two-tape VHS set), forever changing the movies. Then, somehow, Cameron managed to top himself — with 2009’s “Avatar,” which surpassed “Titanic” as the biggest…

When Jimmy Fallon’s popular late-night segment-turned-spinoff “That’s My Jam” launches on the BBC this week, British comedian Mo Gilligan will be at the helm, making his debut in a major primetime slot. Gilligan and Fallon have a lot in common: Both have reinvigorated late-night TV on their respective sides of the pond. With catchy segments like “History of Rap” and “Lip Sync Battle,” Fallon brought a musical flavor to late night long before James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” ever pulled up. Meanwhile, Gilligan, host of Channel 4’s “The Lateish Show” and “The Big Narstie Show,” shepherded a new wave of British late-night programming. “It’s not to say there weren’t ones before,” says Gilligan, citing Alan Carr and Graham Norton as earlier U.K. late-night stars. It was more saying, “Where do I…

WHEN PLAYWRIGHT Martin McDonagh wanted to expand his work from stage to screen, he tested the waters by making a short film. That 2004 effort, the absurdly dark “Six Shooter,” paved the way for his career behind the camera — and won McDonagh his first Oscar. McDonagh would reteam with “Six Shooter” star Brendan Gleeson for “In Bruges” as well as for this year’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” In McDonagh’s latest film, Colin Farrell plays a dairy farmer who has a falling out with his best friend, Colm (Gleeson), on a small island off the coast of Ireland. It’s an Oscars front-runner — proof of just how a career can bloom out of the right short film. Which is a model that Taylor Swift, who announced last week that she’s…

IVE-TIME Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola rings director Sarah Polley from his quaint hotel room desk in Peachtree, Georgia, to discuss Polley’s latest (and perhaps most important) film to date. Polley, the actor-turned-auteur, is in awe as they talk on Zoom through their laptop screens, because Coppola is only days away from starting production on “Megalopolis” — a passion project he wrote in the late ’80s, about an architect in a futuristic New York City. With family and assistants buzzing all around him, Coppola seems fixed only on Polley, whose feature film “Women Talking” explores trauma among a group of Mennonite women after a sexual assault. Coppola confesses he’s been a fan of Polley’s work for years; Polley recalls how she auditioned for “Megalopolis” 20 years prior. The two…

“ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT” EDWARD BERGER BY KIMBERLY PEIRCE DEPICTIONS OF WAR on the big screen are legion, but the most transcendent and indelible of them outlast the ages because they invite the viewer into a state of mind, not merely a numbing and unflinching cacophony of mortal terror. Sumptuous. Mesmerizing. Moving. Three words encapsulate this brilliant film. Edward Berger has managed a courageous new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Courageous because Remarque’s work has already yielded a classic in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 version, which I had the great pleasure of seeing a decade ago at the Royal Albert Hall accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. So sublime was that rendering that I didn’t imagine I would ever want to see another…

Noah Centineo became the internet’s boyfriend of the month with his role as Peter Kavinsky in 2018’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Since then, he’s played a crushworthy quarterback in “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser” and Atom Smasher in DC’s “Black Adam.” Now he’s adding “lawyer” to his acting résumé with his turn as Owen Hendricks in Netflix series “The Recruit,” set to debut Dec. 16. But “The Recruit” isn’t like any other lawyer show: Centineo’s character works at the CIA, where he must learn how to navigate the complicated, overlapping worlds of law and espionage. • What excited you about the role of Owen Hendricks in “The Recruit”? I’ve never seen the CIA portrayed from the lens of a young kid fresh out of school, being recruited…

Executive editor Brent Lang interviewed Sam Worthington in the most New York City way possible: grabbing a booth and several cups of stale coffee in a lower Manhattan diner while a road crew pulverized the sidewalk. We were far from Pandora. Senior entertainment and media writer Matt Donnelly ate popcorn while legendary Francis Ford Coppola and Sarah Polley discussed her masterful “Women Talking.” Senior entertainment writer Angelique Jackson enjoyed being a fly on the wall for the conversations between directors Ryan Coogler and Gina Prince-Bythewood and Tyler Perry and Chinonye Chukwu. Photographer Greg Williams captured Sam Worthington on Nov. 18: “Wherever possible, I love to shoot with just me, my camera and my subject — and Sam really embraced this. We went for an early morning walk in a chilly…

Out of adversity comes opportunity. That’s the view from the top of the Sundance Institute, where CEO Joana Vicente is preparing for her first in-person festival in Park City since she took the reins of its parent non-profit organization in November 2021. “Sundance is so unique in terms of it really is a place of discovery,” Vicente tells Variety. The last-minute cancellation of the in-person festival at the start of this year — due to a COVID surge — was a blow to the institute’s bottom line because so much event expense had already been incurred. And that only added to the financial hole from the 2021 gathering, which also shifted entirely online. But the vast expansion of Sundance’s virtual and streaming capabilities has had a huge silver lining. To…

JOSEPH KOSINSKI’S first meeting with Tom Cruise about directing a sequel to the 1986 blockbuster “Top Gun” was in 2017. Five years later, “Top Gun: Maverick” finally opened, after the pandemic led Paramount to delay its 2020 release until May of this year, when it could play to a global theatrical audience — and did it ever, earning nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. By contrast, “Glass Onion,” writer-director Rian Johnson’s sequel to 2019’s “Knives Out,” came together quickly after Netflix snapped up the rights to the murder mystery franchise, starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc. The original was a theatrical sensation, but Net-flix released “Glass Onion” in around 600 theaters for a seven-day run over the Thanksgiving holiday; its streaming debut is Dec. 23. The filmmakers, both 48, talk about…

WHILE Chinonye Chukwu was filming “Till” — which tells the story of Mamie Till-Mobley’s relentless pursuit of justice following the lynching of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till — she spotted someone she didn’t recognize visiting with the film’s producer and star Whoopi Goldberg on the Atlanta set. “I see this tall man. I was like, ‘Who is this?’” Chukwu recalls. The mysterious visitor was Tyler Perry. “I came in to support,” Perry explains as the two filmmakers sit down. “I just wanted to let you and Whoopi and everybody else know that anything I could do, I was there 100%. Atlanta’s a little bit of my town.” The “Till” production office had been set up at Tyler Perry Studios, which was “glorious,” Chukwu says before asking the million-dollar question: “I…

It’s been four years since Variety put Brandi Carlile on the cover of our 2019 Grammys preview issue. Making that call surely seems like a no-brainer now, given how things have gone with her since, in and out of Grammy land, but at the time, it involved at least a touch of prescience and faith. Who knew that by 2022, she’d be the closest thing to a poster girl for the Grammys that the Recording Academy has, with six wins to date? Her high-water mark of seven nods came this year, as her “In These Silent Days” album and its songs have album and record of the year nods as well as multiple nominations in the divisions dedicated to rock (“Broken Horses”) and roots (“You and Me on the Rock”).…

Hollywood, London, Rome and Mumbai may want to watch their backs. There’s a new player on the international production scene.NEOM is a full-service regional production hub that, in its first 18 months of operation, has already hosted 25 productions, comprising films, TV shows and commercials. Its Media Village and Bajdah Studio soundstages and film production support facilities together make up the country’s largest and are located within the sustainable region NEOM, in Saudi Arabia’s northwestern corner. They have already hosted huge productions such as feature film “Desert Warrior,” a $150 million production featuring 500 people on set daily, and “Rise of the Witches,” a 10-part adaptation for television of a famous Saudi fantasy book series. Each, in its medium, represented the all-time highest-budget shoot in the region. The name NEOM…

When it comes to Sundance, it’s always hard to know which films will soar, which ones will remain earthbound, and which misbegotten bids at cinematic immortality will implode in spectacular fashion. The thrill of discovering the next big thing in movies is what keeps studio executives, agents and cinephiles making the trek up the mountain to Park City, Utah, every year (at least until COVID scuttled things in 2021 and 2022). With Sundance returning in-person, here are five movies that could be in for some high-altitude raves. You Hurt My Feelings Ten years after “Enough Said,” Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are back with the story of a memoirist who finds out that her supportive therapist husband doesn’t care for her new book. Eileen A depressed prison secretary befriends a…

I’m worried that Sam Worthington is going to tear his skin off. He has this tic. When he gets nervous, his right hand snakes under his black T-shirt and starts to gnaw at his shoulder. And what’s got him scratching so intensely is an easy question: Who are the actors you look up to? “It’s too hard to answer these questions, mate,” Worthington says in his thick Aussie accent. What’s interesting is that over the course of a two-hour conversation in a hole-in-the-wall New York City diner, Worthington is an open book about his blown opportunities and personal struggles, recounting them in detail. Just don’t ask him about things like his “process” (a very un-Worthington word), because that’s when he’ll start to scratch. Thirteen years ago, Worthington seemed to win…

GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD — one of the most successful Black women directors in Hollywood and the visionary behind “Love & Basketball,” “Beyond the Lights” and “The Old Guard” — took a special date to the world premiere of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”: her teenage son Toussaint. “Seeing you there, knowing it’s a movie about motherhood more than anything, I got really emotional,” Ryan Coogler, the director who shepherded the superhero sequel, tells Prince-Bythewood. “I was trying hard to hold it in when I saw you both.” The premiere in November was already an emotional affair — as cast and crew paid tribute to the franchise’s late star Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 — and took place just weeks after Prince-Bythewood released her latest hit film, “The Woman King.” The action…

JAMES CAMERON is flanked by towering trees and lush, dream like vistas. No, the “Avatar” director isn’t dialing in from Pandora, he assures Robert Rodriguez. It’s just a screen saver, meant to enliven whatever drab editing bay he’s in, putting the final touches, this November afternoon, on “Avatar: The Way of Water,” his long-gestating sequel to the 2009 blockbuster that introduced the world to the way of the Na’vi. The two men are old friends — having worked together on the sci-fi adventure “Alita: Battle Angel,” which Rodriguez directed and Cameron produced — and clearly have a lot of respect for one another. Cameron, for instance, makes Rodriguez swear a “blood oath” that they’ll make a sequel to “Alita.” And there are other perks to their friendship. Namely, Rodriguez and…

The best things in life are worth waiting for. That seems to be the sentiment surrounding Jorge Drexler and “Tinta y Tiempo” (“Ink and Time”), the physician-turned-musician’s 14th studio album that “almost didn’t happen,” he says. The album swept at the Latin Grammys this year, with the Uruguayan singer-songwriter taking home six trophies, in highly competitive categories with heavyweights including Bad Bunny and Shakira. At the 2023 Grammy Awards, he’ll similarly go head-to-head with champs including Rosalía, Mon Laferte and Fito Páez for Latin rock or alternative album (he’s been nommed in the category before, in 2015 and 2018). Drexler talked to Variety about his award-winning record, which took two years and two weeks to complete. Of your three decades in music, you’ve described this album to be the most…

TV REVIEW Drama: Hulu (8 episodes; all reviewed); Dec. 13 Starring: Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten In the new series “Kindred,” there comes a moment when a bed-ridden child (David Alexander Kaplan) musters the strength to call his caretaker the N-word. The mere act is jarring — but what startles yet more is that the woman he’s addressed speaks up for herself. Dana (Mallori Johnson), the protagonist of “Kindred,” has been magically sent from the modern day back to a 19th-century plantation. Her sense of her rights coexists uneasily with the world into which she’s been thrust. Adapted from Octavia E. Butler’s novel, “Kindred” makes a case for itself in a by-now over-stuffed genre. Exploitative projects like Amazon’s series “Them” or the film “Antebellum” have seemed at times to…