The top stories of 2020 on EVOKE

EXCLUSIVE: R&B recording artist Ledisi (Selma, American Soul) is set to play legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in the biopic, Remember Me: The Mahalia Jackson Story.  Columbus Short (ABC’s Scandal, Stomp the Yard) will take on the role of Martin Luther King Jr., a close friend of Jackson’s. Janet Hubert (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and Wendy Raquel Robinson (The Walking Dead, The Steve Harvey Show) also co-star.

EXCLUSIVE: Golden Globe nominee Dennis Quaid and Oscar-nominated actress Virginia Madsen have signed on for the Jon Erwin and Andrew Erwin-directed sports drama, American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story, along with Ser’Darius Blain, Adam Baldwin, Bruce McGill, Danny Vinson, Chance Kelly, and Hayden Zaller. The new additions join Zachary Levi in the role of Kurt Warner and Anna Paquin as Brenda Warner.

The rumors are true! The highly anticipated 10th season of American Horror Story will be subtitled Pilgrim, a source exclusively tells Us Weekly.

EXCLUSIVE:  We have just learned that The Piano Best Oscar winner Anna Paquin has landed the lead in Kingdom Story Company and Lionsgate’s American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story opposite Zachary Levi.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Tuesday unveiled an extensive program of pop-up performances across the state starting next month with 150 artists from Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Renée Fleming, Wynton Marsalis and Hugh Jackman to orchestras, ballets and theater companies.

Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the alluring subject of Errol Morris’ Showtime documentary My Psychedelic Love Story, became enthralled in the 1970s with the LSD guru Timothy Leary. It’s a sentiment the Oscar-winning filmmaker could understand.

We were today years old when we learned that Kim Kardashian’s divorce lawyer, Laura Wasser, inspired Laura Dern’s character in 2019’s Marriage Story.

Gemma Chan graces the cover of February’s issue of Elle UK, and opens up about how the worldwide success of “Crazy Rich Asians” propelled her career to the next level.

EXCLUSIVE: Exile Content has teamed with Pulp Fiction producer Lawrence Bender to acquire the rights to Azam Ahmed’s New York Times article, “He Was One of Mexico’s Deadliest Assassins. Then He Turned on His Cartel”. Exile and Bender are currently developing the story into a film or series with Ahmed and Caitlin Roper as producers.

Beyoncé shared a four-minute-long video on her Instagram story in which she reflected on 2020. "Cheers to 2020," the video reads.

Also Read: Emerging Female Filmmakers on Challenges of Making Shorts, Especially During the Pandemic (Video)Overall, women accounted for 23% of those working in key behind-the-scenes roles (directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors, cinematographers) on the top 250 grossing films in 2020, up from 21% in 2019, an increase of just six percentage points over more than 20 years.To break it down further, of the top 250 domestic grossing films, women accounted for 17% of writers

LOS ANGELES – As California is once again under a stay-at-home order restricting residents and shuttering businesses because of yet another surge of the coronavirus, which has overwhelmed the healthcare system in the Golden State, it’s difficult to imagine that one year ago the events of this past year were literally the essence of science fiction novels come to life.

Post-apocalyptic films used to have a sort of romance to them. The idea of a desolate wasteland was so otherworldly and foreign that it seemed like the perfect fodder for fun adventures.

Cynthia Littleton Business EditorThis tribute to director Bob Clark and the 1983 chestnut “A Christmas Story” was originally published Dec. 20, 2007 on the Variety blog “Littleton On the Air”It’s that wonderful time of year, time for repeated viewings of the holiday pic that never, ever gets old, 1983’s “A Christmas Story.”TBS is obliging with its annual 24-hour marathon of the pic, starting Monday, Christmas Eve, at 8 p.m.

A Christmas Story was released, but this charming tale remains a holiday essential and a familiar favorite. Adapted from Jean Shepherd's short stories, the 1983 vignette-style film journeys back to the Christmas when then-9-year-old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) wanted nothing more than a grand new Red Ryder BB gun to show up under the tree, despite some alarming protests from certain adults in his life.

If you thought Pixar’s resume couldn’t get any more impressive, “Soul“—the studio’s upcoming release about passion, music, and a soul-in-training—will prove you wrong. That’s no small task.

In a very competitive situation. Blumhouse has won the screen rights to a Dec. 13 New York Times story which chronicled one desperate mother’s revenge spree in Mexico, when she avenged her daughter’s murder by taking on the drug cartels and tracking down the perpetrators by herself. She saw ten of them apprehended by police before she was shot and killed in front of her home on Mother’s Day, 2017.

Top Canadian film director Michelle Latimer has apologized after coming under scrutiny for claiming Indigenous family roots in a Quebec Algonquin community when promoting her documentary Inconvenient Indian ahead of its recent world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. The feature, an adaptation of Thomas King's book Inconvenient Indian, in which the American-born Canadian writer meditates on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, will next have a U.S.