Sunday, June 6, 2021
A few weeks ago, there was every reason to be skeptical about “Cruella.” The creative track record for live-action remakes of Disney animated films was middling to dismal (the only one o…
SOURCE: Variety at 06:30PMMonday, May 31, 2021
Last weekend, the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” featured a satirical promotional spot for AMC Theatres that became a delectable skewering of what’s left of the megaplex experi…
SOURCE: Variety at 08:53PMMonday, May 3, 2021
Olympia Dukakis, who died on May 1 at 89, had a face like no one else’s. Stern but perpetually amused, with a warm leer of a grin that could light up a scene, she looked like the comedy an…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:30PMThursday, April 22, 2021
What’s the thing that a good movie director does? In a way, that’s a silly question, since good directors do a thousand things, and filmmakers are diverse creatures. But in an age of fre…
SOURCE: Variety at 07:57PMSaturday, February 27, 2021
Here’s a vintage Spongebob moment, the kind that makes some of us who are years past the demo feel like we can’t get enough of him. In “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run,” our h…
SOURCE: Variety at 07:32PMFriday, February 19, 2021
The gifted and mercurial Lee Daniels, director of “Precious,” is one of the only filmmakers I can think of who would dare to drop a badass-diva moment of Billie Holiday violently slappin…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:32PMSaturday, February 6, 2021
It’s some kind of paradox — he probably thought of it as a joke played on him by the gods — that Christopher Plummer, the impishly irascible, velvet-voiced star of stage and screen who…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:44AMSunday, January 31, 2021
“Mass,” a drama that consists of two couples seated across a table from each other in a placidly sterile church antechamber, discussing the unthinkable (two of them are the parents of a …
SOURCE: Variety at 07:33PMFriday, January 29, 2021
In “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which opened the Sundance Film Festival tonight on a note of heady historical exuberance, we see images from the …
SOURCE: Variety at 06:09AMFriday, March 1, 2019
Releasing alternate or expanded versions of big-hit movies into theaters isn’t a new idea. The first one I remember seeing was “Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition,�…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:35PMSunday, January 27, 2019
Serial killers are the ultimate compartmentalized criminals — the fear and horror they represent isn’t just there in the gruesomeness of their violence, but in the way they pass among us…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:45PMSunday, October 7, 2018
“A Star Is Born,” Bradley Cooper’s justly celebrated remake of the venerable Hollywood romantic fable, starring Cooper as the bad-ol’-boy rock ‘n’ roller Jackson Main…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:06PMSunday, September 16, 2018
In “Her Smell,” Elisabeth Moss tears into the role of Becky Something, a strung-out hellion indie rock star of the early ’90s, like an angry lioness ripping through a slab …
SOURCE: Variety at 12:14PMFriday, August 31, 2018
“A Star Is Born” is that thing we always yearn for but so rarely get to see: a transcendent Hollywood movie. It’s the fourth remake of a story that dates back to 1932, but this…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:15PMMonday, September 11, 2017
Denzel Washington is a great actor, but as varied as his performances can be, he doesn’t change his aspect very much. The talky boastful energy and toothy sunburst smile, the defiant alert…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:22AMSunday, January 1, 2017
“La La Land,” in theory, is a movie that needs no explanation. The simplest thing you could call it is “an old-fashioned musical” — which means, of course, that it�…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:32PMTuesday, November 22, 2016
“Fences,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by August Wilson, was written in 1983 and had its premiere on Broadway in 1987. But the play is set 30 years before that, in a lower-mi…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:00AMSunday, October 2, 2016
A big-spectacle Broadway production is, quite visibly, a collaborative effort — actors, sets, choreography, costumes, lighting, orchestra. On rare occasions, though, beneath the razzle-daz…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:09PMThursday, September 15, 2016
The movies, in case you didn’t notice, are having an LBJ moment. It began two years ago, when Tom Wilkinson played President Lyndon B. Johnson in “Selma” as a cagey but cou…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:04AMThursday, September 8, 2016
Now that the Summer of Rehashes is over, a lot of people suddenly seem to agree that remaking movies, especially when they’re beloved and indelible classics, is a lousy idea for Hollywood …
SOURCE: Variety at 02:30PMWednesday, August 31, 2016
There was a moment back in the 1970s, sometime before “Grease” came out, when the image of people bursting into song and dance in the middle of a motion picture wasn’t simply corny and…
SOURCE: Variety at 04:45AM 
