How ‘BlackBerry’ Director Matt Johnson Used His ‘Broke Filmmaker Tools’ With a Multi-Million-Dollar Budget to Tell a Great Canadian Story (EXCLUSIVE)

Jessica Simpson got some quality time in with her husband, Eric Johnson, over the weekend. Simpson took to Instagram on Monday to share some loved-up pics from her getaway with Johnson and their friends, Lauren and Bret Harrison.The photo slideshow sees Simpson first in a leopard print coat, black boots and big, red sunglasses as she cuddles up next to her husband, who is dressed casually in a flannel and jeans.

A "Wheel of Fortune" contestant spun the wheel of misfortune as she missed out on two major prizes.  During an episode of the beloved game show, a player from Louisiana named Micki guessed the puzzle letter incorrectly, causing major disappointment among fans. Micki was three letters away from winning not only the million-dollar wedge, but also a trip to Croatia.  Before announcing her letter, audience members are heard in the background cheering her on once the wheel landed on the Croatia wedge.

HBO’s penultimate episode 8 of The Last Of Us delivered 8.1 million viewers Sunday night across HBO Max and linear telecasts. That’s up 74% from the series debut night in January and sets a new series high ahead of next Sunday’s season finale, per Nielsen and HBO.

The partygate inquiry has stated that there are strong suggestions that breaches of Covid rules would have been "obvious" to Boris Johnson.

EXCLUSIVE: A musical stage adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, originally co-created in 2006 by Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical director Matthew Warchus, is headed to the English countryside.

K.J. Yossman Twickenham Studios chair Sunny Vohra has acquired a 6.95% stake in media fund APX Group, becoming one of the main shareholders of its parent company APX Corporation Inc. Vohra has also joined the board of directors and the acquisition committee. The deal, which was worth over $70 million, reflects a market cap of $1.1 billion for APX. Loeb & Loeb LLP’s Mitchell S. Nussbaum advised APX Group on the deal. He is also set to advise the company on other deals ahead of a planned public merger on the New York Stock Exchange later this year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sculptor turned director Wu Lang made a splash at the Berlin Film Festival with his debut feature “Absence” playing in the festival’s showcase Encounters section. With a high-profile cast headed by Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud”) and Li Meng (“The Bad Kids,” “The Guillotines”) “Absence” is an art-house romance that uses skyscapes and urban landscapes as metaphors for inner feelings. The seduction starts with a man’s return to Hainan Island after ten years in jail and ends with a flock of sheep in an abandoned construction site. Wu: Shooting the first short film for me had two purposes. First, making a film is not easy in terms of financing and finding coproducers. So, first I wanted to make a short in order to get myself started.

Ellise Shafer HBO Max’s “Dune” prequel spinoff “The Sisterhood” is going through some changes. Both director Johan Renck and star Shirley Henderson have exited the HBO Max series, Variety has confirmed. The news comes as the production takes a “pre-scheduled hiatus,” according to the streamer. “There are some creative changes being made to the production in an effort to create the best series possible and stay true to the source material,” a HBO Max representative said in a statement. “Johan Renck has completed his work on the series and a new director will be brought on; through mutual agreement Johan is moving on to pursue other projects. Additionally, Shirley Henderson will be exiting the series and will no longer be playing Tula Harkonnen.”

exit as co-showrunner last November.“As ‘Dune: The Sisterhood (wt)’ has entered a pre-scheduled hiatus, there are some creative changes being made to the production in an effort to create the best series possible and stay true to the source material,” an HBO Max spokesperson told TheWrap. “Johan Renck has completed his work on the series and a new director will be brought on; through mutual agreement, Johan is moving on to pursue other projects.

EXCLUSIVE: HBO Max‘s Dune prequel TV series’ long journey to the screen is taking another turn.Dune: The Sisterhood (wt), which started production in late November, is undergoing a creative shift, a director change and a recasting.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Ramsay Street is gearing up to welcome a few more familiar faces. Seven long-time characters are joining Amazon Freevee’s continuation of Australian soap “Neighbours.” The new additions include Annie Jones (as Jane Harris), Rebekah Elmaloglou (as Terese Willis), Georgie Stone (as Mackenzie Hargreaves) and Tim Kano (as Leo Tanaka). All cast members will return as series regulars. Meanwhile, those returning in guest roles are Ian Smith (as Harold Bishop), April Rose Pengilly (as Chloe Brennan) and Melissa Bell (as Lucy Robinson). They will be joined by “Neighbours” stalwarts Stefan Dennis, Alan Fletcher, Ryan Moloney and Jackie Woodburne, who were previously announced.

The competition winners of the 73rd Berlinale are about to start rolling in as the festival draws to a close Saturday evening.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International BritBox International has reached three million subscribers across its eight international markets, Variety can reveal. The “best of British” streamer, which is backed internationally by BBC and ITV, has reached its latest milestone across the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. (The service launched in the U.K. in November 2019 but split off from the global operation in 2022 and is now integrated into ITV’s streaming offering, ITVX.) “Through what’s been a really challenging time for lots of SVODs, we’ve grown by 15% this year, which certainly exceeds that category growth for the U.S., and lots of our competitors in that set,” Reemah Sakaan, the London-based CEO of BritBox International, tells Variety.

Don’t come for their crowns — or licenses. Selling Sunset‘s Christine Quinn and Maya Vander responded after Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles star Josh Flagg threw shade at the Netflix series.

Plans for the multi-million refurbishment of Stretford Leisure Centre have been approved by Trafford council. The state-of-the-art proposals to totally transform the centre on Chester Road in the town were rubber-stamped by members of the council’s executive.

Chances are high that, if you are reading this on the go, you are doing so on your iPhone. Apple, which first introduced the phone in 2007, now holds a whopping 24% share of the smartphone market, meaning that out of every four phones sold today, one is an iPhone.

Who knew a Canadian biopic of an infamous smartphone could be this entertaining, even poignant and moving? I am here to tell you today’s World Premiere Berlin Film Festival competition entry, BlackBerry is all that and more.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened? Frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy, “BlackBerry” spins comedy from the seat-of-their-pants launch and subsequent flame-out of “that phone that people had before they bought an iPhone,” as one character puts it. Directed by Matt Johnson — the renegade mock-doc helmer responsible for 2013 Slamdance winner “The Dirties” and moon-landing hoax “Project Avalanche” — from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, this sly tech-world satire freely extrapolates from journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal,” refashioning that wild ride into something that approximates their favorite movies.

A Hollywood success story! Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso have been going strong for two decades.

The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-CEO Jim Balsillie (a bald, scarily fulminous Glenn Howerton).The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world, told in a low-key, off-the-cuff observational style closer to mockumentary than recent tech-bio approaches like the flashy moral-monologuing of Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs”) or the Shakespearean heft of “The Dropout.”Maybe that’s the wry Canadian sensibility in Toronto-based Johnson and Miller, whose previous two movies (“The Dirties,” “Operation Avalanche”) were found-footage larks about the thrills and perils of collaboration.