‘Summer of Soul’ Rock Doc Hits Upbeat $1.4M; ‘Loneliest Whale’ Debuts; Sparks In Cannes – Specialty Weekend

Jennifer Lopez is keeping Ben Affleck close to her heart. After celebrating her 52nd birthday aboard a yacht in Saint-Tropez with her on-again beau, the superstar stepped out in Monaco on Monday sporting some new sparkle: a gold chain necklace that spelled out "BEN" in bold block letters.

It all makes sense now! Adele‘s unexpected new romance with sports agent Rich Paul, 39, was apparently alluded to weeks before their outing at the NBA playoffs on July 17. In a May 31 interview with The New Yorker, Rich said that he was “hanging out” with a major pop star — and now it’s all but clear that he was talking about Adele, 33. “She was over yesterday,” Rich told the publication. He never referred to the “Hello” singer, or whomever he was talking about, by name.

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Christopher Vourlias Mubi, the London-based streamer and theatrical distributor that’s been on a buying spree this week in Cannes, has acquired the rights for North America, U.K., and a host of other territories for Kira Kovalenko’s “Unclenching the Fists,” which took home the top prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Variety can reveal.Set in a former mining town in Russia’s North Ossetia region, “Unclenching the Fists” is the story of a young woman, played by Milana

Christopher Vourlias Saul Williams spent nearly a decade bringing his directorial debut “Neptune Frost” to the screen, but not even the multi-talented, multi-disciplinary artist could have scripted the mad dash it took to take his passion project from the rolling hills of East Africa to the Croisette in Cannes.Shot on location in Rwanda over the course of 27 frenetic days, “Neptune Frost” had just wrapped principal photography last spring when the coronavirus pandemic began grounding planes and

CANNES, France -- Celebrated Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov is banned from leaving his home country, so he is attending the Cannes Film Festival virtually. Serebrennikov phoned into the red-carpet premiere of his film, “Petrov's Flu,” by FaceTime and spoke to the media on Tuesday by Zoom.A seat was left open for the 51-year-old director when “Petrov's Flu” premiered Monday in Cannes.

EXCLUSIVE: Oscilloscope Laboratories has swooped on North American rights to Costa Rican-Swedish filmmaker Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s debut feature Clara Sola here in Cannes.

Christopher Vourlias Kirill Serebrennikov made an appearance by FaceTime on Monday after the premiere of “Petrov’s Flu,” which bowed in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The 51-year-old helmer is banned from leaving Russia and was unable to attend the opening.“I would like to thank everyone who is here.

Christopher Vourlias Three years after his musical drama “Leto” bowed on the Croisette, Kirill Serebrennikov returns to Cannes’ main competition with “Petrov’s Flu,” a deadpan, hallucinatory romp through a post-Soviet Russia in the grips of a mysterious flu epidemic. The acclaimed director spoke to Variety about living with fear and making the most out of solitude.How did you get involved with “Petrov’s Flu”? I was hired to write the script.

Will Thorne Staff WriterIn “Medusa,” the latest film from Brazilian director Anita Rocha da Silveira, the main character and a gang of her female friends don creepy white masks to attack other women in the street whom they deem to be “promiscuous.”Silveira draws amply from both fictional and real tales of women-on-women violence to portray a snake pit society where religion, toxic masculinity and right-wing politics intertwine in an all-too-familiar fashion.“Medusa” invokes the most famous

If you’ve ever fancied taking the train from Moscow to the far northwestern Russian city of Murmansk above the Arctic Circle, Compartment No. 6 (Hytti No. 6) will almost certainly cure you of the urge. At the same time, Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s second film, which is about such a journey, offers up vivid emotional twists and turns that are charted with unusual acuity, qualities that will propel it to a modest but well noted life on the festival circuit.

Naman Ramachandran “Postman” by Russian filmmaker Klim Tukaev has won the first prize at the sixth Nespresso Talents global short film competition.“Bagman,” by Jan Kellner, took the second prize, while “Speaking in Flowers,” by Nicolina Sterbet, took third.

Christopher Vourlias Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun returns to the sun-scrubbed Sahel region of West Africa for his latest feature, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which competes for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.Set on the outskirts of the capital city of N’Djamena, “Lingui” is the story of a single mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), whose already fragile world threatens to collapse when she learns that her daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio Brahim), is pregnant — a

th birthday party, it’s hard not to think of the climactic prom scene in Brian DePalma’s “Carrie” – not in the sense of buckets of blood or anything like that, but in the way both films suggest that repressing female desires via religion or anything else can end very, very badly.

Directors’ Fortnight premiere Clara Sola has many aspects in common with a coming-of-age sexual awakening story — and yet the heroine of Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s drama is 40 years old. A sheltered woman living in remote Costa Rica in the shadow of her religious mother, Clara (Wendy Chinchilla) appears to have learning difficulties that are never discussed or named.