Lena Dunham wants to make an ‘older, wiser’ version of ‘Girls’

Dane DeHaan (The Staircase, ZeroZeroZero) has signed on to star alongside Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie and Josh Hartnett in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer for Universal Pictures, Deadline has confirmed.

Utopia has taken U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s latest directorial Sharp Stick which made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release is planned for later this year.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorLena Dunham’s Sundance entry “Sharp Stick” has been acquired by small indie distributor Utopia for U.S. rights.

Utopia has acquired the U.S. rights to writer-director-producer Lena Dunham’s Sundance comedy “Sharp Stick,” which follows a young woman’s unexpected quest of sexual exploration and self-discovery, Utopia announced on Monday.Utopia will release the film theatrically in the U.S.

Emmerdale fans have seen an unexpected arrival take to the screens in the shape of Marcus Dean. Son of soap villain Pierce Harris, Marcus has arrived in search of his criminal father’s ex-wife Rhona Goskirk. With Marcus and Rhona struggling to get hold of one another after Vanessa pretended to be Rhona, fans are eager to find out how the storyline unfolds.

With wife Lauren Bushnell and 7-month-old son Dutton at home, Chris Lane is a family man — but he didn’t always see himself that way.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentHere, Variety talks with Fernando León de Aranoa, director of the Javier Bardem-starring “The Good Boss” (“El Buen Patron”), Spain’s Oscar entry, which is a big box office hit on home turf and has scored more Spanish Academy Goya nominations than any other film in history.What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar?I feel a mix of joy and responsibility. It means following the steps of some of the greatest Spanish filmmakers who have done it before, being among a group of brilliant directors from all over the world and having the opportunity of showing “The Good Boss” to a wider audience.What’s been the most challenging aspect of your campaign thus far?To make our film visible amidst the strong contenders.

Sarah Jayne Dunn has revealed she will audition for “other acting roles” on Loose Women, after she left Hollyoaks for Only Fans. The 40 year old had her contract terminated on the hit Channel 4 soap after two decades on the show, as she wanted to keep her Only Fans account. While the exit was a “huge shock” to Sarah, she admits that her “intention” is to keep acting and she will be looking for other roles.

Has any Broadway production in recent (or even not so recent) memory arrived with as much emotional baggage – or carried it as lightly – as the visually and sonically ravishing MJ? The Michael Jackson musical, as unlikely as such a prospect might have seemed a year ago, now appears poised to take Manhattan with the same hurricane force that the real Jackson funneled when he moonwalked into television history on Motown 25.

Lena Dunham got a little help from her friends! For her new movie,, the star tells  that she asked Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn for their help, which is why they are given a Thank You credit at the end of the film.«They are just really great friends of mine who watched a really early cut of the film and gave me notes,» Dunham says of Swift, who was a bridesmaid in her wedding, and her actor boyfriend. «They’re both just really interesting, perceptive people. Taylor’s been one of my close friends for a really long time and Joe is an actor who I actually ended up working with on a project that I shot just a few months after this.», directed and written by Dunham and starring Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal and Luka Sabbat, follows Sarah Jo, a naive 26-year-old living on the fringes of Hollywood with her mother and sister.

Elizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentAfter Lena Dunham’s new movie “Sharp Stick” was criticized on Twitter by an autism activist who claimed she was approached to be a consultant on the project, the filmmaking team behind the Sundance film says that the central character, Sarah Jo, was never written to be on the spectrum. Producers say the drama about a young woman’s sexual awakening was inspired entirely by creator Lena Dunham’s personal journey, dealing with severe endometriosis which resulted in a hysterectomy.“Sarah Jo was never written nor imagined as a neurodivergent woman,” a spokesperson for the film says, in part, in a statement to Variety.

Lena Dunham is giving fans some insight into her new movie Sharp Stick!

Lena Dunham is sharing her thanks for Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn.

The Janes,” “Call Jane” and “Aftershock“). It’s a complex topic to be sure, which Dunham and her cast enthusiastically embraced.

in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many high-minded inspirations. She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family and design your own family and how that’s just as meaningful.” Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy? Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do.

Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.