Peter Debruge Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Flannery O’Connor saw folks in a way few writers did. She saw through them, past their petty prejudices and hollow pieties, to the less civilized selves they so desperately tried to keep under wraps.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s almost cosmic, the way kids start out as nothing more than a twinkle in their mother’s eye. Then they’re born into heavenly little bodies, orbiting the adults who made them like tiny moons, until such time that they overcome their parents’ gravitational pull. So it is with “Janet Planet,” one of those intensely personal portraits of childhood that we’ve come to expect — and appreciate — from A24, the indie studio behind “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird” and “Aftersun” and “Eighth Grade” (the example this one most resembles).

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s hard to say whether Wes Anderson’s sensibility is perfectly suited to that of Roald Dahl or the other way around. Whichever it may be, the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” author’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” seems to have found its ideal screen incarnation in the “Fantastic Mr.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic We’ve all seen our share of stories about inspirational teachers. “The Holdovers” is dedicated to the opposite sort: a hard-ass named Paul Hunham whom everyone hates. The feeling is mutual, as Mr.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The best scene of “Call Me by Your Name” has nothing to do with fruit, but a frank father-son conversation. Brittle to the point of breaking, Timothée Chalamet sits on the couch, arms crossed, resenting his dad for acknowledging the source of his anguish. “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was,” Michael Stuhlbarg tells the boy.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s the moment of truth for Emerald Fennell, whose “Promising Young Woman” established the actor-turned-auteur (last seen playing pregnant doll Midge in “Barbie”) as a formidable new filmmaking talent. Building on the barbed sensibility she established with “Killing Eve,” the writer-director’s zeitgeist-throttling feature debut lured audiences like a bright red candy apple, leaving them with plenty to debate after the cyanide-laced sugar high wore off.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Just who is the Equalizer? Despite a hit TV show in the 1980s and another with Queen Latifah still running, that title has become synonymous with Denzel Washington, who returns as government-assassin-turned-vigilante Robert McCall. Billed as the final chapter in a trilogy, “The Equalizer 3” sees McCall finding community in a picturesque part of Italy and being forced to protect its people from the mafia. The film also reteams Washington with director Antoine Fuqua for the fifth time (following “Training Day,” “The Magnificent Seven” and the two previous installments), and their comfort with one another ensures a seamless action movie that might not attract new fans, but should play well to those already fond of this franchise.

Tatiana Siegel “Cat Person,” which launched with a bang at Sundance, will be released in theaters on Oct. 6 through Rialto Pictures. The wild thriller — which stars Emilia Jones (“CODA”) and Nicholas Braun (“Succession”) as a couple whose signals cross, leading to disturbing interactions — made its world premiere to a huge response at the festival in January.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In out-there Estonian comedy “The Invisible Fight,” a clueless Russian border guard somehow escapes a surprise attack by three formidable Chinese action figures — gravity-defying kung fu warriors who swoop in out of nowhere, blasting Black Sabbath on their bright red boombox — so he does what anyone in his position would do: He resolves to become an Orthodox monk. Huh? “I guess God has other plans for you,” a less-fortunate comrade wheezes with his dying breath, setting up one of the oddest plots audiences are likely to find on the art-house circuit this year.

Michaela Zee Craig Schulz, the son of “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz, is hopeful a new movie based on the comic strip will happen.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It would come as no surprise to learn that “Back on the Strip” started out as a “Magic Mike” parody. I’m not saying that it did. (The main character is named Merlin, not Mike, after all.) But what else could explain the bizarrely literal premise of an ensemble indie comedy in which our hero is a wannabe magician who heads to Vegas hoping to be the next David Copperfield, only to wind up shaking his wand for a Chippendales-style male dance revue instead? What makes “Strip” so consistently funny for most of its too-long two-hour running time isn’t Merlin’s lame prestidigi-dream (that part feels like co-writers Chris Sanders and Eric Daniel have been watching too many Nickelodeon movies) but the sorry state of his fellow dancers: a has-been crew called the Chocolate Chips.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Essential Truths of the Lake” is the last thing most people would expect from Lav Diaz: a direct follow-up to his previous film, “When the Waves Are Gone.” It’s not a sequel, per se (this one actually comes earlier), but they are connected, with a third movie featuring the same disillusioned police detective in the works. The Filipino filmmaker, whose pokey social critiques run anywhere from three to 11 hours, established the character of Lt.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Back in the 1970s, when Korea was closed to the outside world, locals relied on black market dealers to get their hands on everything from American cigarettes to Ritz crackers. Though this illicit import racket was run mostly by men, it wouldn’t have been possible without half a dozen uniquely talented women — skilled divers known as haenyeo who fished the loot from the sea.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The “prince of England’s hearts” falls for the American president’s son (or is it the other way around?) in “Red, White & Royal Blue,” an effervescent gay rom-com that might be easily dismissed as a mere trifle, were it not for the still-historic novelty of its existence. Arriving less than a year after “Bros,” director Matthew López’s Amazon-backed, R-rated lark goes even further to normalize queer romance on-screen, taking a classic “chick flick” premise — the kind once reserved for Mandy Moore and Amanda Bynes movies, à la “Chasing Liberty” or “What a Girl Wants” — and recasting it with dudes.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic This year marks 30 years since Bob Byington’s first feature, though it’s only during the last 15 of those — since SXSW midnight-movie breakout “RSO: Registered Sex Offender” — that the Austin-based director has enjoyed “indie darling” status. During that same stretch, the cultural discourse has changed a great deal, while Byington’s voice remains remarkably (if somewhat frustratingly) consistent, churning out self-deprecating feature-length sitcoms about flaccid man-babies.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Nearly two decades ago, “March of the Penguins” crossed a frontier hardly any nonfiction film ever does: not just the Antarctic Circle, but the even more remote $100 million mark at the global box office. A bona fide global phenomenon, Luc Jacquet wondrous nature doc — and its adorable, relatable emperor penguin stars — got audiences from practically every continent to turn their attention to the South Pole and the super-adorable, surprisingly relatable emperor penguins its director found there.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Disney’s live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid” will finally arrive on Disney+ on Sept. 6.

Peter Debruge pmc-editorial-manager “you’re full of hate and frustrations. you should take a break,” director Quentin Dupieux once tweeted at me, immediately following my review of his 2014 film “Reality.” In another world, someone might have advised him against picking a fight with a film critic. You know, never quarrel with a man who buys ink by the barrel, and all that.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Will Smith told Kevin Hart on a new episode of Peacock’s “Hart to Heart” talk show that he “went too far” as an actor while portraying a slave in the Apple drama “Emancipation.” The film, Smith’s first release after the notorious Oscars slap, centered on the true story of a runaway slave named Peter, a photograph of whom became a rallying call for the abolition of slavery as it depicted his mutilated back scars from several whippings. “I went too far in ‘Emancipation,’” Smith said. “Just bringing it up, I start to get teary.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Lately, in the overwrought majority of Hollywood blockbusters, nothing less than the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, as some natural disaster or dastardly supervillain threatens to annihilate life as we know it. Such impossibly large stakes may be necessary to justify the CG spectacle of certain Marvel movies, but instead of inspiring excitement, they mostly leave me ambivalent and bored.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Fiftysomething French couple Antoine and his wife Olga move to Galicia looking for a fresh start. Instead, they find only hostility and hardship in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beasts,” a deeply uncomfortable portrait of everyday evil that’s all the more terrifying for being true — not the two main characters, who are fictional, but the conflict that comes to define their new life in that wild corner of northwest Spain.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It started as a joke. Way back in the ’80s, the phenomenon we now call “superhero fatigue” was already a thing, at least among comics afficionados. Frustrated with pulp creators recycling the same old ideas, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird hatched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For a few years there back in the early ’80s, Disney took a turn to the dark side, releasing live-action movies like “The Watcher in the Woods” (featuring a creepy late-career Bette Davis) and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (from the mind of Ray Bradbury) that were intense enough to inspire nightmares — in kids, at least. The youngsters of that time are now parents, and some are surely asking themselves how far they can trust Disney not to traumatize another generation when a movie like “Haunted Mansion” comes along.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic As someone who grew up in Texas back in the late 1980s, when “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” takes place, I can assure you: The last thing any closeted Southern teen wants is to stand out. That must make it a special kind of torture to be named after thinkers one’s peers aren’t likely to read until college.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A distressingly large number of first-time American indie films focus on coming-of-age stories. In cases where the director is gay, there’s a good chance said that first feature will be a coming-of-age/coming-out story. What else should we expect? The directors haven’t been on earth all that long, and they write what they know, or else, what they’ve seen in other movies. That said, “Big Boys” surprised me. Corey Sherman’s deliciously uncomfortable debut features a lot of the usual ingredients: a misfit teenage protagonist, a transformative couple days (in this case, a “cousins’ camping trip” to Lake Arrowhead), a series of embarrassing but life-altering experiences. But I hadn’t seen anyone like his main character at the center of a movie before and loved how awkwardly this kid navigates trying to figure himself out.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic With Jane Birkin’s passing, France loses both an icon and one of its greatest enigmas. To focus on France is not to diminish the fact that Birkin’s death will be mourned around the world. Alongside Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Hardy and Catherine Deneuve, Birkin was one of the last surviving 1960s femmes who sparked global interest in French culture. Except that Birkin wasn’t French. She was born in London and clung to her English accent all her life. Birkin was perfectly fluent, but cultivated a faux-naïf way of speaking her adopted language that reinforced her persona as the eternal child. For the French, it was all part of her singular charm, established decades earlier… and which she sometimes struggled to escape.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “The Miracle Club” may not be a faith-based movie in the traditional sense (that is, a film made with an explicitly evangelical Christian agenda), but this Ireland-set art-house offering is a movie about faith all the same — specifically, about the conviction that drives four women to make the pilgrimage from Ireland all the way to Lourdes, France, where the waters are believed to have holy healing powers. If “The Miracle Club” were an overtly religious film, audiences would know from the outset what to expect from the trip (namely, a miracle), whereas director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t presume to play God, focusing more on mending the relationship between his main characters.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sooner or later, Ethan Hunt will face a mission he really ought not to accept. But for the time being, he remains the one man on earth willing to attempt the impossible without questioning the motives of those who require his services. That’s the deal with America’s most dutiful boy scout, Tom Cruise, who’s carried the billion-dollar “Mission: Impossible” franchise across 27 years without losing steam. Compare that with Indiana Jones, who’s failed to connect with a younger generation, or the Fast and Furious movies, which aren’t running out of gas so much as guzzling the laughing sort. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” finds Cruise, now in his sixties, still running from one side of a very big, very wide screen to the other as if his life — and the lives of all 8 billion people on earth — depended on it. This is Hunt’s seventh blockbuster outing, with a last franchise-capper set to release next summer, and while it can’t eclipse what came before (“Fallout” was the series high), director Christopher McQuarrie delivers a formidable concept and several hall-of-fame set-pieces while somehow also managing to tie the storylines back into these movies’ core mythology.

Sophia Scorziello editor Paramount and Apple have released the second trailer for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone in one of the year’s buzziest films. “Killers of the Flower Moon” marks Scorsese’s first narrative feature since the 2019 film “The Irishman.” The Apple Original film has set its wide theatrical release for October 20, and will subsequently stream on Apple TV+. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is based on David Grann’s non-fiction novel of the same name, which investigates the dozens of harrowing murders of Osage people in Oklahoma throughout the 1920s. Scorsese’s film and Grann’s book follow romance of Enerest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Gladstone) and the immense wealth of one Native American nation.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Every Body,” an activist named Alicia Roth Weigel sits on her couch, swiping through profiles on a dating app and explaining to the camera — and a public who’ve likely never had the opportunity or occasion to think about such things — how challenging it is to find a match. Weigel was born with both male and female biological traits, which a doctor immediately sought to correct via surgery (Weigel describes the loss of her testes as “castration”) so the child would conform to society’s idea of female. But Weigel is not female; she/they are intersex, and her/their story is one America needs to hear. Why? Well, for starters, in the past six months, an estimated 560 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 49 states. Trans and intersex are not the same thing, representing two entirely different letters in the catch-all LGBTQIA+ label. Still, acknowledging the existence of intersex individuals — “whatever that is,” a noxious Fox host sneers in one clip — gives the public an entry point for a much-needed conversation about the great many people who don’t fit neatly into the conventional boxes of “male” and “female” (as they might appear on a DMV application or restroom placard).

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Breakout Sundance star and rapper Tia Nomore has signed with Range Media Partners for representation in acting and music. Nomore is the lead in Savannah Leaf’s upcoming A24 drama “Earth Mama,” in which she delivered a critically acclaimed debut feature performance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as a struggling single mother. Well established in hip hop, Nomore rose to prominence as an artist on the Oakland music scene. In “Earth Mama,” Nomore stars as expectant mom Gia, who already has two kids in foster care as she anticipates a third. Though she has the support of a tight-knit community in the Bay Area, she faces formidable challenges in reclaiming her family and building a new life. A24, the studio behind the Oscar winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” will release the film on July 7.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Once upon a time, animated movies made it easy to tell the heroes apart from the villains. Now, the trend is for princesses to remain happily unmarried (“Frozen”), for kids to know better than their elders (“Encanto”) and for monsters to be revealed as misunderstood allies (“Luca”). For a while, those twists on the Disney fairy-tale formula felt surprising to audiences, aligning nicely with where the cultural conversation was headed. Through repetition, however, such enlightenment has become its own cliché. Enter Nimona, who brings a fresh dose of attitude to such inclusive messaging. She’s a monster, but doesn’t like to be called that. (And who can blame her?) Apparently the only one of her kind in a fictional kingdom where medieval customs and flying cars aren’t mutually exclusive, Nimona is capable of shape-shifting into practically any species — be it a shark, a rhinoceros or a ginormous dragon — though her hot pink hair/fur/skin makes it kind of hard to blend in. When she first appears in the rowdy Netflix animated feature that bears her name, Nimona is sporting a pixie-punk haircut, piercings and an insatiable desire to do maximum damage to the society that’s been demonizing her for roughly a millennium. She is not what anyone would call a good girl, and that makes her a far more interesting character than practically any princess.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If you’re going to make a movie about a kraken — those giant multi-tentacled sea monsters believed to wrestle ships from below — then computer animation is hands down the way to go. The trouble with doing so at a major American studio is that it comes with the imperative to turn these fantastical creatures into cutesy-wootsy kid-movie fodder, which is precisely what DreamWorks Animation does with the reasonably clever myth-twisting toon “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken.” The creative team’s high-concept take suggests “Twilight” as a (literal) fish-out-of-water comedy, wherein a family of blue-skinned squid-things attempt to pass as human. Fifteen years ago, Flora (voiced by Toni Collette) and Peter (Colman Domingo) abandoned the ocean to raise their kids on land. Despite the obvious hurdles — their conspicuous cerulean tint, floppy limbs and invertebrate status — they’ve been reasonably successful at blending in. Anytime someone looks suspicious, Ruby (Lana Condor) just says she’s from Canada, and that does the trick. But Ruby’s not nearly as comfortable with her own otherness, which she’s spent her entire life trying to disguise. All of that gets a lot more difficult a few days before prom, when she dives into the sea to save her crush, Connor (Jaboukie Young-White). Contact with water awakens something deep within Ruby and releases her inner kraken.

Marta Balaga Studios shouldn’t rely just on IP-based content to make artistically bold choices, said director Jeff Rowe at Annecy. “Right now, things like ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Sperverse’ are this Trojan horse – they are taking a well-known IP and using that to break artistic boundaries and move the medium forward. My hope is that the studios will take these kinds of risks also with original ideas.” Rowe, now behind “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” spoke out at Variety’s “Breaking the Borders of Animation” panel, moderated by its chief film critic Peter Debruge. 

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s Juliette’s fifth birthday, and she can wish for whatever she wants. Top of her list is an adventure, the likes of which this restless girl has only read about in books — specifically, a series of fantasy novels published by a family friend, about a capricious wizard who controls the wind. In “Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams,” a quiet afternoon takes an unpredictable, eye-popping turn, as Juliette (voiced by Loïse Charpentier) and her 8-year-old sister Carmen (Maryne Bertieaux) are whisked away to a dazzling surreal world of alligator-shaped airships and bird-headed opera divas, where seemingly anything can happen. Welcome to the imagination of French director Benoît Chieux, who has crafted — in the year 2023, against considerable odds — a truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.” It’s been roughly half a century since those two movies demonstrated just how liberating the medium of animation can be, but you wouldn’t know it to watch Chieux’s hand-drawn curio, which takes the mesmerizing dream logic of such projects and applies is to an “Alice in Wonderland”-style plot.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic During his lifetime, Rock Hudson was a model for American masculinity. That changed after his death, when the strapping, straight-acting (but occasionally sensitive) hunk from Winnetka became the poster boy for Hollywood homophobia: a closeted star who’d been forced to play a role his entire career that wasn’t true to himself, on screen and off. “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” treats that compromise as a tragedy, leaning on the fact Hudson died of AIDS to underscore the injustice, but Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality. Built around interviews with a handful of former lovers and friends, Kijak spills private details from Hudson’s personal life, ranging from whom he shagged to how he arranged such trysts in the first place. A secretly recorded phone call reveals Hudson to be a “size queen,” audibly excited by the prospect of meeting a tall, well-endowed stranger. The whopper — which underscores the kind of salacious gossip Kijak gravitates toward in the film — comes from Joe Carberry, who recalls, “Rock had a sizable dick, but he tried to put that thing up my ass, and I couldn’t do it.”