Tag: film festival

By Peter Debruge     According To The variety Boundaries are constantly blurring in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” the revolutionary mid-’80s film that became a Kander and Ebb musical, and that cunningly (and stunningly) morphs back to the big screen, courtesy of “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon. Confined mostly to an Argentine detention facility in 1983, at the height of the country’s Dirty War, the show is the flip side of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” focusing on the brutal military regime that followed Eva Péron’s ouster. Bleak as that may sound, the musical finds rare shards of light — and an unlikely connection — in the most despairing of places. In every incarnation of Manuel Puig’s novel, cinema offers much-needed escapism from not only political injustice, but also the k...

By J. Kim Murphy According To The variety SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses the plot and ending of “Presence,” now playing in theaters. As with many ghost stories, the presence in “Presence” has a good reason to haunt its house. After watching on as the Payne family turns against one another, the Presence that drifts around their newly purchased, bougie abode makes a grand gesture to save its tattered residents. Looming above as the drugged Chloe (Callina Liang) is about to be murdered by her new boyfriend Ryan (West Mulholland), the ghost swoops downstairs to awaken her brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) from his own roofie-induced slumber. In a possessed rush, Tyler storms up the stairwell, down the corridor and enters the bedroom to tackle Ryan, who has already killed one of C...

By Jennifer Maas According To The variety Sterling K. Brown is done crying every week. Two days before Thanksgiving, Brown is sitting at a long table in a photo studio in Culver City, digging into a take-out lunch as he begins to break down the plot of his new Hulu drama series, “Paradise.”  Brown chooses his words deliberately while simultaneously ramping up his energy to match his passion for the subject. It’s a significant departure from “This Is Us,” the NBC family drama that made Brown a star as fan-favorite character Randall Pearson, and was known for giving audiences a good weep. Though “Paradise” hails from the same creator and executive producer, Dan Fogelman, this series aims to provoke very different emotions in viewers. It’s a contemporary political thri...