Variety International Achievement in TV Honoree Cecile Frot-Coutaz Conquered Foreign Languages and Lands

SEVENTEEN have opened up about the meaning behind their new single ‘Darl+ing’Earlier this month, the 13-member act unveiled their first-ever English language single ‘Dar+ling’, along with its heartwarming music video. The song serves as a pre-release track for their upcoming full-length album, due out in May.While sub-units and solo members of the group had previously released songs in English, the new track had marked their first English song as a full group.

To Bridget, who cannot cook! Bridget Jones’s Diary was a huge hit when it debuted in April 2001 — and its stars have only kept rising.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThe Venice Film Festival is getting in gear to celebrate its 90th anniversary with an international conference to be held in Venice in July.The Biennale, which is the fest’s parent organization, has announced it will hold a confab on July 9 in Venice in the library auditorium of the Biennale foundation’s archives. It will be attended by an as-yet unspecified plethora of international film academics, critics, and also film directors and talents, to commemorate the advent of the world’s oldest film fest.The First Exposition of Cinematic Art — later to be known as the Mostra del Cinema in Italy and the Venice Film Festival globally — opened on Aug.

Guy Lodge Film CriticOperation Mincemeat was an aptly absurd code name for what was, on the face of it, a preposterous British military mission: In 1943, with Allied forces planning to invade Sicily and wrest it from fascist Axis control, two intelligence officers conspired to convince the Nazis they were targeting Greece instead, pulling off the ruse with false documents and the stolen, dressed-up corpse of a fictitious British marine. It’s a true chapter of history that nonetheless sounds like a war film as dreamed up by Ealing Studios scriptwriters; it’s practically begging to be made into a farce, and sure enough, the gag-filled knockabout musical “Operation Mincemeat” hits London stages this very month.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” isn’t bewitching audiences, at least, compared to other films set in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.The latest chapter in the prequel saga, which takes place decades prior to the adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione, opened at the international box office over the weekend and pulled in $58 million from 22 overseas markets. That’s a steep drop from 2018’s “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” the previous entry in the fantastical series, which collected a spell-bounding $191 million in its international debut.“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” opens in North America next weekend.

Happy Friday readers. Tom Grater here looking back on the week’s top international headlines.

An Albanian man agreed to move a vehicle from one car park to another on behalf of criminals for £55 - but he was caught by police with cocaine.

It was July 1943 when MI5 started “the greatest deception in history.”

Jesse Williams is celebrating the opening night of his Broadway show!

Michael Appler Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson celebrated the Broadway opening for “Take Me Out” on Monday evening in New York at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater.A revival of the 2003 Tony-winning best play, headlined by Williams, Ferguson and Patrick J. Adams, “Take Me Out” is the third of 19 new shows that will open this month, continuing the march of star-driven offerings in Broadway’s first regular season since its return after the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

EXCLUSIVE: Natalie Chaidez (, Queen of the South) has signed an exclusive multi-year deal with Warner Bros. Television. As part of the deal, she will develop and create original programming via WBTV for all platforms.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentTwo-time Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi and his French producer Alexandre Mallet-Guy are denying reports that the Iranian auteur has been sentenced and found guilty on a charge of plagiarism pertaining to his latest film, “A Hero.”Farhadi’s former student Azadeh Masihzadeh has accused the filmmaker of stealing the idea for “A Hero” from a documentary she made during a filmmaking workshop held by Farhadi in 2014 in Tehran.“A Hero” is about an earnest-looking man named Rahim who, while on furlough after being imprisoned for debt, returns a lost handbag full of gold coins — an act that appears to make him a good samaritan. However, the story ends up being more complicated.

Manori Ravindran International EditorFew people can say their comfort zone is in playing strong women, but for Gillian Anderson, it ’s become something of a personal brand.The American-British actor, who was once best-known for her skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully in Fox’s long-running sci-fi hit “The X-Files,” has gone on to play detective Stella Gibson in “The Fall,” notorious British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Crown” and sex therapist Jean Milburn in “Sex Education.” (And you wouldn’t want to cross any of them.)Anderson — who will receive the Variety Icon Award in a ceremony at CannesSeries on April 1 — will next be seen portraying the rarely dramatized Eleanor Roosevelt, opposite Viola Davis’ Michelle Obama and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Betty Ford, in Showtime’s drama “The First Lady.” But portraying no-nonsense women didn’t begin as a conscious choice for Anderson. In 1993, she recognized a “stark difference” between the Dana Scully role and “pretty much everything else on television at the time,” though, at age 24, she wouldn’t have labelled Scully as the feminist icon she’d come to represent.“I don’t think it was as clear-cut in my mind as being, ‘Oh, this is a feminist character,’” she says.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentIn the run up to MipTV, Keshet International has unveiled a raft of new shows, spanning factual and foreign-language dramas, including “Ellie Simmonds: A World Without Dwarfism?” from the U.K., “Roomies” from Finland, “Storm Lara” from Belgium and “Family Dinner Date” from Israel. “Storm Lara” is a a real-time thriller produced by Belgium’s A Perfect View which has been commissioned by Flemish streamer Streamz and was part of this year’s Berlinale Series Market Selects. “Storm Lara” revolves around five people whose lives collide during a late-night radio show.Ordered by BBC One and produced by Flicker Productions, “Ellie Simmonds: A World Without Dwarfism?” is a one-off documentary about British Paralympian Ellie Simmonds who travels around the U.K.

Wilson Chapman editorDuring his acceptance speech at Friday’s ICG Publicist’s Guild awards luncheon, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola made an impassioned plea for the Russian invasion of Ukraine to end.“I confess I met Putin, and I met Zelenskyy who is really a show business guy, his whole government, all of them are actors,” Coppola said during his acceptance speech. “And I know of what I speak when I say, if one word would just be said, one word with the force of meaning: Stop.