“Flight Risk,” an action thriller directed by Mel Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg as a balding, unhinged pilot, landed in first place with $12 million from 3,161 North American theaters in its opening weekend.

It’s the second consecutive Lionsgate release, following “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” to debut at No. 1 as the studio takes advantage of January’s otherwise desolate box office landscape. Case in point: Second place went to Disney’s “Mufasa” which opened six weeks ago. The “Lion King” prequel added an additional $8.7 million from 3,420 cinemas, bringing its tally to $221 million in North America and $626.7 million globally.

“Flight Risk” brought in another $4.2 million from 39 international territories over the weekend, boosting its worldwide haul to $16.2 million. The film cost $25 million, so it’ll need to keep flying during its theatrical run. That could be challenging because critics and audiences lambasted the film, which holds a dismal 21% average on Rotten Tomatoes...

Still a lot of holdover business in the early part of the year at the international box office as we ride out late-2024 releases. That shouldn’t take away from the fact that Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King – which, recall, initially started softer than expected – now leads a global weekend for the 6th time in a row.

Meanwhile, Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is still tearing up records. After becoming the biggest of the franchise globally last weekend, it’s now tops for the trilogy overseas.

Starting with Mufasa, the worldwide total to date is $626.7M, while the running international cume is $405.6M.

Overseas, Mufasa added $15.4M this session (-29%) and is still the No. 1 non-local film in France, Germany, Spain, Brazil and the Latin American region overall as well as many smaller markets.

The Top 5 markets to date are: France ($38.1M), UK ($34.7M...

Channing Tatum brought some movie star heat to a snowy Sundance this weekend, popping up in a previously unannounced role in one of the festival’s premiere titles.

Tatum has a scene-stealing cameo in “Atropia,” the feature directorial debut from Hailey Gates. The film is led by Alia Shawkat and British heatseeker Callum Turner. It follows the wild true story of completely fabricated villages on U.S. military bases, where actors and stunt crew helped troops prepare for the Iraq War.

Shawkat and Turner play performers for hire on one such elaborate set, thrilled by the news that a bona fide American movie star (Tatum) will participate in a chemical weapon attack simulation to prepare for an upcoming role.

Tatum is perfect as a douchey A-lister, looking for authenticity and street cred alongside real soldiers in a make-believe scenario. At Variety‘s Sundance Studio presented by Audible, Shawkat revealed she...

According to a new report, the Michael Jackson biopic has run into some legal issues that is delaying its release.

The movie, which stars Michael‘s nephew Jaafar Jackson as the late King of Pop, was originally supposed to premiere in April 2025. However, the release was pushed back to October.

A reason was not given at the time. However, it has been suggested that some legal issues has led to required reshoots and revisions to the script.

Keep reading to find out more…

A report from Puck, which was cited by Rolling Stone and Billboard, suggested that the movie in its current iteration violated a legal agreement reached with Jordan Chandler, who accused Michael of molesting him.

Jordan reportedly came to an agreement with Michael‘s estate to never be referenced in any sort of project about the musician. He also received a $20 million settlement.

The outlet reported that the...

Robert Eggers has zero plans to make contemporary movies, featuring modern-day inventions and technology.

The Nosferatu director recently told Rotten Tomatoes that the idea of making such projects makes him feel “ill.”

“The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill,” Eggers said. “And the idea of photographing a cellphone is just death. And to make a contemporary story you have to photograph a cellphone — it’s just how life is — so no [I won’t be making any modern-set films].”

The filmmaker has helmed several projects that have spanned periods from 1630s and 1890s New England to the Viking Era, including 2015’s The Witch, 2019’s The Lighthouse and 2022’s The Northman, respectively. Most recently, Nosferatu, starring Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård, was set in 1830s Transylvania.

Elsewhere in the interview, Eggers was asked exactly how modern he would potentially go for a project. He responded, “I don’t know. I might go potentially...

Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s “How to Build a Library” may be more aptly titled, “How to Game the System.” This is not meant as derisive, but simply the reality faced as the documentary’s central figures, Angela Wachuka and Wanjiru ‘Shiro’ Koinange, work to raise money, gladhand, and reshape traditional library practices in order to create a de-colonized space for Africans young and old to grow, learn, and connect. Noble as their pursuit may seem, after five years making inroads with politicians, many of the values they held at the beginning of the film don’t necessarily remain intact by its conclusion.

“How to Build a Library” begins in 2017. Shiro and Wachuka are a writer/publisher duo who team up to form Book Bunk, a “social impact firm” built on the mission of revitalizing the McMillan Library in the downtown area of Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi, as...

The Sundance Film Festival has begun and journalists, actors, directors, writers, agents, producers and film buffs have taken over the once-sleepy town of Park City, Utah for Hollywood’s premiere indie showcase. Together, they hop from screening to screening in hopes of witnessing the next big breakout hit. Some of this year’s most anticipated films include “Bunnylovr” from first-time director Katarina Zhu, “The Thing with Feathers” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the Dev Patel thriller “Rabbit Trap.”

Between all the glitzy premieres, the Variety Studio presented by Audible remains a destination for actors and filmmakers alike. Stars such as Rachel Sennott, Dylan O’Brien, John Lithgow and Carey Mulligan all stopped by to discuss their new projects and snap a picture in the portrait studio. Check out the photos from this year’s Sundance Studio and see which stars stopped by.

More from VarietyJennifer Lopez Says 'Kiss of the Spider Woman...

Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the Un’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then […]

The post “It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass! first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the "The Big Bang Theory" episode "The Celebration Experimentation", Sheldon (Jim Parsons) is about to turn 36 but is reluctant to celebrate his birthday. He explains that birthday parties were always terrible for him as a child as he would have to share them with a twin sister and that his sister's friends were aggressively mean to him. One particularly painful memory involves Sheldon's sister telling him that Batman would be coming to the party, even though no such appearance had been arranged. Sheldon was disappointed that Batman didn't arrive and has hated birthdays ever since.

Sheldon's girlfriend Amy (Mayim Bialik) convinces Sheldon to have a party anyway, hoping to erase the stigma. He reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile, Raj (Kunal Nayyar) and Howard (Simon Helberg) decide to finally make good on Sheldon's unfulfilled Batman promise by hiring Adam West himself to come to the party and meet Sheldon face-to-face. West, of course,...

“Is it even possible for something designed as entertainment to be a public service?” Predators cinematographer-editor-director David Osit asks this question of ethnographer Mark de Rond about NBC TV show To Catch a Predator and its successors, but it also applies to this project’s of-the-moment anxieties about nonfiction practice. Documentaries seem to have entered a phase of self-reflexive fretting about their own impact; I think one reason No Other Land has become so popular is because it explicitly states this, having its subjects worry about their Facebook click rates and wonder out loud whether the film they’re making can possibly […]

The post Sundance 2024: Predators, André is an Idiot, Marlee Matlin: I’m Not Alone first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For her sophomore feature “Dead Lover,” which premiered in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, co-writer/director and star Grace Glowicki embraced not only her creepy side, but her smelly side too.

Speaking to IndieWire’s Christian Blauvelt at the IndieWire Studio in Park City, presented by Dropbox, Glowicki said of her character, “She’s a lonely gravedigger who smells so bad of corpses, no one will come near her. And she’s got a lot of emotions, so she’s very funny and angry and vulnerable and tender and all these sort of different things. So she’s kind of this anomaly of feelings and stink.”

To hone this particular strangeness, Glowicki worked with her cast to find the characters best suited for each individual performer, all of whom outside of the writer/director/star play multiple parts. This includes Glowicki’s co-writer, Ben Petrie.

“It was a really unique casting process,...

If you're only familiar with director Steven Soderbergh's take on Danny Ocean's (George Clooney) story in his "Ocean's" trilogy — which kicked off in 2001 — you might not know that the actual first movie centering around a guy named Ocean and a big Las Vegas heist actually came out in 1960. So which ones in this series are the best, and which are the worst?

I feel pretty comfortable saying that I'm going to ruffle some feathers with this ranking, and I'm fine with that. I love picking hyper-specific hills and then dying upon them; it's one of my absolute favorite hobbies. Still, with just five "Ocean's" movies to choose from — putting aside the rumored prequel with Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie as Danny's parents — it's a fairly close ranking, but there's still a definitive answer. Here are the "Ocean's" movies ranked from worst to best, and I guarantee people...

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? It would be hard to narrow it down to only one moment or day, as Mad Bills was a journey unlike any other. That we got through it was anything short of impressive considering the ambition of our story and our limited time and resources, however much a testament to the skill of the […]

The post “For the First Time, I Could See the Film in Front of Me” | Joel Alfonso Vargas, Mad Bills to Pay first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Not every villain in the "Harry Potter" franchise is an evil Death Eater — or, in "Muggle" terms, a follower of the evil Dark Lord Voldemort (played by Ralph Fiennes in the films). Take Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), for example, who first shows up in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" as a Ministry of Magic plant who comes to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry ostensibly to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts ... but who's really there to spy on and censor the leadership of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). Umbridge is unquestionably vile and evil, and as series author Joanne Kathleen Rowling explained in the Harry Potter encyclopedia Wizarding World, the character is firmly meant to show that "good" and "evil" aren't always what they seem.

After describing a woman with whom she once worked whom Rowling described as a "bigot" who also loved pictures of...

As a first-time feature filmmaker, writing and directing is enough to put on your plate, but with “Bunnylovr,” actress Katarina Zhu knew the whole impetus for creating the project was to craft the kind of character she was dying to play. Speaking with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio at Sundance’s IndieWire Studio, presented by DropBox, Zhu was joined by her cast, which includes her friend and peer from NYU and Stella Adler Studio, Rachel Sennott.

Recalling their time in school together, Sennott told IndieWire, “We had to go around in acting school and, like, say a word to describe what energy you gave off. Everyone to me was like, stoner. She could work in a grocery store and be really high. That was mine. But for Katarina, it was like, queen, angel, whatever.”

Though Zhu appreciated this memory, her actual post-grad performance output was hampered by the limited roles available to her,...

Director Cooper Raiff returns to Sundance after his prize-winning Cha Cha Real Smooth with the episodic series Hal & Harper, about a pair of codependent siblings and their father. The first four episodes of Hal & Harper will screen as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Episodics section. Besides directing, Raiff also served as editor on the series. Below, he talks about his approach to editing as a writer-director and why editing the series transformed his understanding of its characters. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your series? What were the factors and attributes that led […]

The post “Connect Images in the Edit Based on an Analysis of Characters”: Editor Cooper Raiff on Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Jennifer Lopez brought major star power to the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance ahead of the world premiere of her new musical, “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” She was joined in the interview by the film’s director, Bill Condon, best known for writing the Oscar-winning “Chicago” and for directing “Dreamgirls,” and co-star Tonatiuh. Lopez was exuberant in saying she’s waited her whole life for a film role like this.

“I was waiting my whole life to be able to do a real big MGM Hollywood musical, and I finally got to do it,” Lopez told Variety’s Matt Donnelly. “It was more [than I hoped]. Me and Diego [Luna] were on set and we’re dancing around and we’re singing and looking at each other and it’s like we don’t want to do anything else but musicals. Diego said that! Me too. I don’t want to do anything else.

When “To Catch a Predator” aired as part of “Dateline NBC” from 2004 to 2007, it drew the kind of praise that rarely met early reality TV. It wasn’t just reality TV, it was a social good, a way of exposing men who would sexually prey on underage teenagers, a way of getting evidence to convict men who showed undeniable intent to commit statutory rape. This is the kind of show of which even Jon Stewart, famously critical of exploitative TV, said, “I approve” when welcoming the series’ host, Chris Hansen, on “The Daily Show.”

The show ended in part because of legal entanglements related to the death of one of the alleged predators it had caught in one of its stings. Almost 20 years later, it has spawned an entire universe of unauthorized spinoffs, some still involving Chris Hansen himself.

Now there’s a documentary about “To Catch a Predator” and its aftermath: “Predators,...

With a handsome actor like Joel Edgerton, audiences typically find themselves looking at his face, or those ice-blue movie-star eyes. But in “Train Dreams,” I found myself looking at his hands, great big mitts, with thick fingers and knuckles like gnarled roots that don’t get that way on their own. Over the years, I’ve seen more movies than I can count in which pampered actors who’ve never lifted an ax or changed a tire in their lives try to convince us they’ve spent decades in the coal mines. Edgerton feels like the real deal.

In “Train Dreams,” the Australian actor channels the spirit of the men who tamed the American Cascades, chopping down trees and laying track. Somewhere between an elegy and an anthem, this gorgeous, almost-century-spanning film was directed by Clint Bentley, one half of the creative team responsible for “Sing Sing” and “Jockey”. The inspiration hails from a slender,...

Hal & Harper charts the development two codependent siblings with a lifetime of inside jokes and their father. The series is directed by Cooper Raiff (Cha Cha Real Smooth), who plays Hal; Lili Reinhart; and Mark Ruffalo. The first four episodes of Hal & Harper will screen as part of Sundance’s Episodics sidebar. Doug Emmett the series’ cinematographer, describes the show’s naturalistic and raw feel below. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors […]

The post “Something That Felt Unadorned and a Bit Raw”: Dp Doug Emmett on Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Park City – Somewhere in the Black Sea, residents of the remote island of Carpathia have spent decades, maybe centuries, trying to vanquish a species of vermin known as the Ochi. Never heard of an Ochi? Well, this fictional creature on a fictional island in a fictional world will remind you at first of a Mogwai from “Gremlins” until it grows up and becomes something slightly more ape-like. As a baby, however, it’s undeniably adorable.

Continue reading ‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: Breathtaking Visuals & Impressive Puppetry Only Go So Far [Sundance] at The Playlist.

The Ochi are a mythical forest species that communicates in sensations rather than words. By contrast, Isaiah Saxon’s “The Legend of Ochi” is a somewhat inert but ingeniously crafted fantasy adventure story that mostly communicates in visuals.

Visuals like: A teenage girl traipsing across the Carpathian mountains with a small woodland creature — imagine if Willem Dafoe and a snub-nosed golden monkey were fused together in a vat of blue eyeshadow — riding in her backpack. Like the actual Willem Dafoe clad in a suit of World War I armor as he leads a squadron of peashooter-packing children to chase the girl down. Like Emily Watson driving a pick-up truck with a wooden hand and blasting Italian rock music as one of the most beautiful matte paintings this side of “The Black Narcissus” stretches out into the landscape around her. “The Legend of Ochi” may not have a lot to say...

Tom Blyth may have starred in Francis Lawrence’s box office hit “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” but that doesn’t mean the British actor is moving on from independent film.

Case in point: “Plainclothes.” In writer-director Carmen Emmi’s feature debut, Blyth stars as Lucas, an undercover cop in 1990s Syracuse, N.Y., who falls in love with Andrew (Russell Tovey), one of his targets in a sting operation going after gay men for public indecency in a mall bathroom.

“There is just something really refreshing about the scrappiness of a smaller film like [“Plainclothes”],” Blyth tells me during a Zoom video interview for this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast from Senegal, where he is shooting Claire Denis’ “The Cry of the Guards.” “I’ve done a bunch of them this year and last year. I’ve gone back to that kind of on purpose.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? The most memorable day was the day Mark, Lili, Betty, the whole crew—especially the camera operators—and I started laughing and couldn’t stop during a random scene. In the scene my character, Hal, tells everyone he got a job at J. Crew and they all are like “okay,” “interesting decision,” “why?” etc. And it just […]

The post “We Just Kept Bursting Out Laughing” | Cooper Raiff, Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

We live in an age of biopics, and musicians are an unusually common theme that dominates that genre. In recent years, we've seen biographical dramatizations of Elton John ("Rocket Man"), Elvis Presley ("Elvis"), and Amy Winehouse ("Back to Black"). As of this writing, the most recent entry to the musical biopic genre is "A Complete Unknown," where Timothée Chalamet channels what can only be described as a "pretty good" iteration of Bob Dylan. The cascade of musically-infused biographies won't slow down any time soon, either. We've got projects on Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Louis Armstrong, and The Beatles (among many others) on tap for the next few years.

The barrage of pop chart biopics begs the question, which one is the best? Is there a biopic of a musician that is considered better than all the rest? The answer, according to IMDb, is yes. In fact, there is one film...

Chris Carter's 1993 paranormal investigation series "The X-Files" was one of the defining media outings of its decade. Few shows better captured post-Cold War America's paranoid suspicions about its own government. Without an enemy to fight, and with no wars on the immediate horizon, 1990s America became wary of the systems that caused war and "enemies" to form in the first place. If we could live without them, why didn't the government jettison them earlier? Could it be that the government was up to something sinister? 

"The X-Files" manifested that paranoia through Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), two FBI agents assigned to investigate paranormal cases. They frequently met aliens, monsters, psychics, vampires, and other unusual creatures. Sadly, each case usually involved a cover-up or a lack of hard evidence. The series was enough of a hit to last nine full seasons before its cancelation in 2002. "The X-Files...

Bill Murray concedes he hasn’t been proactive about finding work as an actor. The “Groundhog Day” and “Lost in Translation” star has appeared in just a few independent films, such as 2024’s ensemble crime comedy “Riff Raff” and Naomi Watts-led drama “The Friend,” in recent years.

“I’ve been lazy,” Murray said at Sundance Film Festival during a fireside chat on Sunday with critic Elvis Mitchell at the Elvis Suite. “I don’t have an agent anymore, so I’m not the first person people think of to be in studio movies.”

However, Murray, who reprised roles in 2023’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and last year’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” has a renewed desire to get back in front of the camera.

“Only in this last year, doing these [indie movies], has reawakened me about searching for material,” he said. “I’ve lived the life of a bass… waiting...

The sounds from Chicago that would forever alter dance music get an overdue documentary treatment in Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. The film is directed by Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) and screens in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres section. Jeremy Stulberg (Growing Up Coy) served as editor for Move Ya Body. Below, he discusses the process of finding the personal story within the raw material and explains why documentary editing is like writing, which necessitates a new way of thinking about the work. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you […]

The post “Our Work is More Akin to Writing”: Editor Jeremy Stulberg on Move Ya Body: The Birth of House first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A black and cursed cloud, a vector of misfortune, follows Idaho day laborer Robert Grainier in director Clint Bentley’s elegantly crafted and ruminating Denis Johnson adaptation, “Train Dreams.” Beginning with a Pov shot of a cut tree dropping dead to the ground, the camera fixed to where the fir was felled, this 20th-century portrait of the Pacific Northwest weaves much pain and suffering in the life of Grainier, played with a hardened soul by a bearded Joel Edgerton.

Robert goes from day laborer to Spokane railroad logger, perennially tested by a nature that seems to have more control over human destiny than people themselves do. Co-written by Bentley with Greg Kwedar (the primary creative team behind “Sing Sing”), “Train Dreams” thrives on its philosophical inquiries into the earthly randomness of events that make up a life. The effect — amplified by skillful craftsmanship and a fondness for detail in even...

The thriller is a broad, often unpredictable genre, each film within it largely defined by a litany of subgenres and genre mash-ups. But whether taking viewers into the far reaches of the future, the unfamiliar throes of eras past, or the depths of a criminal underworld that exists in our present society, what unifies this vast and widely varied category of films is their singular ability to make our hearts race from opening to closing credits.

As far as streaming services go, Netflix has some of the best thrillers available to stream -- in part because they produce a fair amount of them themselves. We've combed through their offerings to share with you the 15 best thriller films on their platform, if for no other reason than to alleviate your analysis paralysis and send your movie night on the road to excitement.

Read more: The 25 Best '80s Action Movies Ranked...

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Rebuilding was shot in the San Luis Valley, the oldest part of Colorado. It is a great desert plain cut through by the high Rio Grande. The San Juan Mountains mark it to the west. They are old, eroded, and gentle. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains line the Valley to the east. They are […]

The post “There was Time to Know, Already, I’ll Remember This.” | Max Walker-Silverman, Rebuilding first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" universe is brimming with interesting characters. From brutal Harkonnens to heroic Atreides, conniving Reverend Mothers to heartwarming Fremen, the franchise has no lack of interesting people. If there's one fellow who wins the award for the guy you want around, though (for the laughs along with the protection), it has to be Jason Momoa's Duncan Idaho. From his surprisingly mundane last name to his relaxed nature to his battlefield prowess, Idaho is a standout character in "Dune" — that is until he suddenly dies toward the end of the first movie.

As Paul Atreides and his mother, Jessica, flee from the wrath of the Harkonnens, Idaho stays behind, giving his life to slow their enemies down and give his lord and lady a chance to escape. This heroic last stand makes Idaho's role that much better in the story, but it also means Momoa had to...

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? The most significant day was the day our production coordinator’s apartment caught on fire. That morning, we drove to set and noticed a smoking apartment tower. We went about the day as normal. At a point, we hear all of these sirens. Our production coordinator gets a call to inform her that her apartment […]

The post “The Day We Became a Family” | Elegance Bratton, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

At this point, saying Mark Hamill is the definitive Joker is as redundant as saying Kevin Conroy is the definitive Batman. While every Bat-fan has their favorite performance of both character, Hamill and Conroy have enjoyed such enduring appeal as the Clown Prince of Crime and the Dark Knight, respectively, that since playing the roles in "Batman: The Animated Series" they have returned to the characters in everything from video games to animated movies and even live-action TV appearances.

But the original Fox Kids series is where an entire generation of '90s kids witnessed Conroy and Hamill's performances for the first time. Prior to its 1992 debut, there had never really been anything quite like the now-beloved animated series. Co-creators Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski, along with a team of indispensable contributors that included writers Paul Dini and Alan Burnett, crafted a show that appealed to kids without talking down to them.

In a moment near the end of our interview at the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox, Callum Turner gets sheepish about dropping a certain four-letter word. The British actor asks if he’s going to be bleeped. When I say that he won’t — IndieWire is edgy and won’t tolerate censorship! — he says he actually really wants, perhaps desperately, to be bleeped.

Perhaps it’s the kind of American talk show convention the 34-year-old Londoner wants to embrace as he continues to make a mark in the U.S. The rising star has already been in “Green Room,” “Emma,” “The Boys in the Boat,” as well as “Masters of the Air,” but late night show ubiquity still lies ahead for him. And it’s gonna happen.

The frantic desire to be bleeped certainly captures the manic energy of his new, cockeyed rom-com, “Atropia,” directed by Hailey Gates and co-starring Alia Shawkat.

Two documentaries premiering at Sundance this weekend are set thousands of miles apart — in Nairobi, Kenya and Texas, respectively – but at the heart of their stories is the same thesis: the importance of libraries to any healthy democracy. And, in each of the film’s most compelling scenes, also a plea: to save them.

Kim Snyder’s “The Librarians” follows a group of librarians, dubbed FReadom Fighters, who have resisted book bans in Texas, Florida, Iowa and beyond. But the urgency of the Sarah Jessica Parker-produced doc is underscored by another film on the lineup: Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s “How to Build a Library,” which follows two Kenyan woman’s mission to restore a public library in the country’s capital, Nairobi.

Wachuka and Shiro are the stars of the 103-minute film, which trails the intrepid pair as they work to transform the city’s formerly whites-only library,...

The 2025 Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition feature Plainclothes, the feature debut of writer-director Carmen Emmi, mixes a paranoid, anxious police thriller with a coming out narrative. It follows a police officer, Lucas (Tom Blyth), tasked with arresting gay men whose job gets complicated when he falls for one. Plainclothes mixes lo-fi surveillance footage with a contemporary digital aesthetic. The film’s cinematographer, Ethan Palmer discusses mixing formats and using cinematography to highlight the protagonist’s journey. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were […]

The post “There Was an Interesting Opportunity to Mix Formats”: Dp Ethan Palmer on Plainclothes first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The arc of Sherwood Schwartz's sitcom "Gilligan's Island," which first debuted in 1964, is well documented by TV historians. Because it was so broad, unrealistic, and silly, the series garnered some pretty negative reviews from critics. "Gilligan's Island," after all, takes place in a slapstick universe where none of the characters have to wrestle with survival; their food and water supplies seem to be well taken care of, and all of the characters more or less get along. The only terrible fate the castaways faced was the ever-sinking reality that they would never return to civilization. Which, from the look of it, wasn't too awful a thing to ponder, as they had a bottomless supply of clean water and fruit salads. 

Audiences seemed to latch onto the show's generally nonthreatening tone, however, and the show was almost an instant success. After three seasons, "Gilligan's Island" was folded into a near-perfect...

From surrealist depictions of motherhood to multi-disciplinary music bio-docs, mothers and daughters playing fictionalized versions of themselves to homegrown TV projects, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival has featured an electrifying selection, once again proving its importance as one of independent cinema’s greatest forums.

Many of entertainment’s biggest names from around the world made the annual pilgrimage to Park City, Utah, perhaps for one of the last times they’ll be able to. Celebrating independent film’s biggest week of the year, the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, was there to capture all of the excitement. The teams behind many of the festival’s buzziest projects visited the studio for exclusive interviews conducted by IndieWire editors, and stayed for the fun times shared with peers.

There was Rachel Sennott reuniting with best friend Molly Gordon, and Logan Lerman getting to meet Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch chatting it up with Stephan James,...

Lucas is a young undercover police officer tasked with cracking down on gay communities whose job gets complicated when he falls in love with one of his targets in Plainclothes. The film is the feature debut of writer-director Carmen Emmi and is part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. Erik Vogt-Nilsen (Big Boys) served as the editor on Plainclothes. Below, he explains how his own coming out, as well as his background in both dance and commercials, helped him shape the narrative and striking a balance between observing Lucas and inhabiting his point of view. See all responses […]

The post “The Intense, Emotional Journey of Navigating One’s Queerness”: Editor Erik Vogt-Nilsen on Plainclothes first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s good for theaters when a smaller-budget non-franchise film opens to $12 million, as Mel Gibson’s “Flight Risk” (Lionsgate) did this weekend. It’s a problem when that’s enough to make it the weekend’s top gross.

This was also the post-Oscar nominations week, although the delay in their announcement disrupted distributor strategies to capitalize on them. Two — “A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight) and “The Brutalist” (A24), the latter expanding to 1,118 theaters — placed in the top 10.

Among limited runs, “Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (Zeitgeist) with $19,000 at Manhattan’s IFC Center had the best initial showing for a platformed documentary in some time. Liza Minnelli’s fans and more turned out for what could be a niche success.

Mel Gibson’s first film as a director since “Hacksaw Ridge” in 2016 is his weakest grosser. His prior five titles grossed close to $1 billion in adjusted box office, more...

From April 4 to May 23, 2001, Comedy Central ran eight episodes of a 30-minute sitcom called "That's My Bush!," a sendup of the then-active George W. Bush administration. The premise of the show was as broad as possible. George W. Bush (Timothy Bottoms) was in the White House, but his life was more akin to that of an old-fashioned, 1980s-era workplace sitcom than that of a sitting president. There was a noisy, obnoxious laugh track paired with bright, even TV lighting, making the show look deliberately old-fashioned and artificial. Kurt Fuller played the buttoned-down killjoy Karl Rove, while Carrie Quinn Dolin played Laura Bush.

More than being a spoof of the Bush administration, however (and there was plenty to spoof), "That's My Bush!" was a satire of all-American sitcoms. Show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker (of "South Park" fame) merely used the White House as a backdrop to mock dated sitcom...

In Sierra Falconer’s debut feature Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), the lives of strangers intertwine at the Northern Michigan location, a place where time seems to move more slowly. Sunfish is editor Chelsi Johnston first editor credit on a fiction feature after working further below the line on productions including Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos. Below, she discusses the importance of preserving the film’s location in the edit and finessing the beginning of the film. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor […]

The post “I Wanted to Make Sure the Energy of the Place Was Preserved”: Editor Chelsi Johnston on Sunfish first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“I had recently done a job and not enjoyed the process that much,” Olivia Colman said at the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox, in talking about the circumstances that led to her new film “Jimpa,” directed by Sophie Hyde.

“And then my agents said ‘I think you’re gonna love this one. I think you’re gonna love working with Sophie.’ And I thought, ‘I really want to work with Sophie,’” Colman added. “You do a piece like this with a filmmaker like this which sustains you over the next few, which won’t be quite as enjoyable potentially. Although I do often like the work I do. Oh God, I’m now offending everyone. Ask someone else a question!”

That bit of fun right there shows the relaxed, family-like atmosphere among Colman, Hyde, and Colman’s costar Aud Mason-Hyde (who’s also the child of Sophie Hyde) when visiting the IndieWire Studio.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? I think it would have to be the first scene we shot. We were filming in a beautiful cabin we had built on location in eastern Washington, and Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones were just starting to bring their characters to life. What was scripted as a simple dialogue-free moment naturally grew into a […]

The post “It Might Yield Something Truly Beautiful” | Clint Bentley, Train Dreams first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of […]

The post “You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Michael Chiklis is most (and deservedly) famous for playing corrupt LAPD detective Vic Mackey on "The Shield" -- but before that, he was more of a comedy actor. There's a reason he got the part of Ben Grimm/The Thing in director Tim Story's super family-friendly "Fantastic Four" films.

Before "The Shield," Chiklis' two leading TV roles were "The Commish" (about a wholesome police commissioner in a small New York town) and "Daddio" (a short-lived sitcom about a stay at home dad). Then he made a conscious choice to change his image, shaving his head, going to the gym and ultimately landing "The Shield" due to a run-in with his neighbor, series creator Shawn Ryan.

If this sounds familiar, or Chiklis' past roles make his performance as Mackey seem shocking, remember that Bryan Cranston also played goofy dad Hal on "Malcolm in the Middle" before he became Heisenberg on "Breaking Bad.

Park City – Park City – The logline for Sierra Falconer’s “Sunfish (& Other Green Lake Stories),” a world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, must sound like a snooze. The description of the first story in the official synopsis begins with, “A girl bonds with her grandparents through sailing and birding.” In prose, that’s hardly a scintillating sell. And yet, these four stories set on Green Lake, a peaceful body of water in Michigan, mark the debut of a filmmaker seemingly wise beyond her years.

Continue reading ‘Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)’ Review: Sierra Falconer Chronicles The Everyday Humanity In A Breezy Summer Community [Sundance] at The Playlist.

One of the great benefits of the Sundance Film Festival is that it provides a forum for independent film producers to gather and not only share war stories, but celebrate one another and offer support for the films being unveiled. On Sunday, January 26, the Sundance Producers Celebration was held for this exact purpose, with the 2025 Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Awards being presented to producers of films premiering at this year’s festival. “Babygirl” producer David Hinojosa also delivered the keynote address.

Joe Pirro received the Amazon Studios Fiction Producers Award for his work on the remake of “The Wedding Banquet” starring Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone, while Danielle Varga received the Amazon Studios Nonfiction Producers Award for the documentary “Seeds.” Both will receive a $10,000 grant as part of this prize. IndieWire shares Hinojosa’s keynote exclusively below.

David Hinojosa: This is truly a place that allows you to be exactly who you are.

In Kiss of the Spider Woman, director Bill Condon of the 1985 film of the same name amid Argentina’s Dirty War. Set partially in a prison as Molina (Tonatiuh) recounts his favorite Hollywood musical to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna), the film blends period realism with Technicolor glamor. Tobias Schliessler, who has also worked frequently with Peter Berg, served as director of photography on the production, his seventh time working with Condon. Below, he explains how he altered his lighting, equipment, and style to contrast the film’s 1981 prison scenes with its musical sequences, which seek […]

The post “These Two Worlds Couldn’t Be More Opposite”: Dp Tobias Schliessler on Kiss of the Spider Woman first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.