When film historians speak of the first screenings of Louis Lumière’s “The Arrival of a Train,” they describe the Paris audience flinching in their seats to avoid being struck by the...
There are two completely different kinds of brutality afoot in movies like “Screamboat,” the latest in the low-budget horror movie craze to pervert beloved intellectual property the instant their 95-year copyright...
Billboard Women in Music 2025 In two decades at Variety, I have reviewed precious few slasher movies. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t take much pleasure in...
Director Monica Strømdahl’s “Flophouse America” provides a visceral documentation of poverty in America. Flophouses are cheap, run-down motels where many people are forced to live when they cannot afford better housing....
Gorgeously rendered in picturesque cinematography, “Always” offers a meditative and patient look into the life of an adolescent poet in rural China. But the poetry is not limited to the protagonist’s...
Jason Statham is good at his job, which explains why he keeps booking the same kinds of movies — well, that and the fact that people keep watching them. Reuniting the...
In the summer of 1969, a sensitive, X-rated studio movie called “Midnight Cowboy” proved a box office surprise, upending norms when it won best picture at the Oscars. Flash forward to...
If high school is a popularity contest — the mistaken-priorities assumption that drives writer-director Amy Wang’s SXSW-winning assimilation satire “Slanted” — then Chinese American senior Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) could be...
