hollywoodreporter.com - 12 617 Showbiz News and Updates

The first thing you need to know about Daniel Sivan's feature documentary Dirty Tricks, premiering as part of the Hot Docs festival, is that the title is a pun. You see, it's about a cheating scandal in the world of elite bridge and, of course, a "trick" is the standard competitive unit in the game — as it is in hearts, spades and euchre.

To appreciate the roving, sometimes gauche nature of Viral, a new documentary following seven YouTube vloggers in 2020, one must consider its experimental form. Premiering at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the film, directed by Udi Nir and Sagi Bornstein, is entirely composed of YouTube videos.

Jacques d'Amboise, the premier New York City Ballet dancer who displayed his energy and athleticism on the big screen in the musicals Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Carousel, has died. He was 86.

Bill and Melinda Gates announced Monday that they are divorcing. The Microsoft co-founder and his wife, who launched the world’s largest charitable foundation, said they would continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications, which recently unveiled a $4.8 billion deal to combine media, production and content assets with Mexico's Televisa, has unveiled financial metrics and preliminary first quarter results as it considers potential financing transactions and market opportunities.

Ryan Reynolds and his Maximum Effort Productions have signed a three-year first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures. The move reteams the indefatigable actor with many of the key executives that formerly ran 20th Century Fox, Reynolds’ home studio of not just his previous deal but also the Deadpool movies that trampolined the actor to new heights of stardom.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo cleared the way for Broadway productions to reopen May 19, announcing Monday that most novel coronavirus-related capacity restrictions in New York and New Jersey will be lifted on that date, including those that have prevented Broadway theaters from operating for more than a year.

Roku, the market leader among streaming device makers, has long pitched itself as the overarching platform of streaming TV, a place to find content from any network or content company. That basic pitch isn’t changing, but if this year’s Newfront pitch to advertisers is any indication, the company is leaning more heavily into exclusive content, as it seeks to bolster its advertising business.

After picking up the once theatrically bound WWII feature Greyhound, Apple has landed another Tom Hanks-fronted feature. The streamer has acquired sci-fi movieFinch, previously titled Bios, fromAmblin Entertainment.

Who says the NFL's TV rights deals were done? Just a few weeks after the league inked a $100 billion-plus TV deal with Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, CBS and Amazon, the tech giant is swooping in to snag even more exclusive NFL games. Amazon has struck a deal to take over exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football one year early, buying out the games that had been set to air on Fox.

Twitter Spaces on Monday launched worldwideto all accounts with 600 or more followers, the social media company announced. The feature isin the same vein asClubhouse, an invitation-only, audio-onlyapp.

Leave No Trace actor Thomasin McKenzie has been cast to play gymnast Kerri Strug in Olivia Wilde's Perfect biopic for Searchlight, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Strug was hailed as an American hero when she completed her final vault at the Atlanta Olympics on a badly injured ankle to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

If the Recording Academy was attempting to appease naysayers by axing the anonymous review committees who, for years, have determined the nominees for major categories at the Grammys, it failed to win over one of its biggest critics: the Weeknd, who affirmed his boycott of the awards show on Monday.

The Los Angeles Times has found its new lead editor. Kevin Merida, who has lead ESPN's The Undefeated vertical since 2015, has been named executive editor of the 139-year-old newspaper.

Wynn Hammer, the veteran still photographer who worked behind the scenes on such acclaimed movies asBound for Glory, The Deer Hunter and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as well as on dozens of TV shows, has died. He was 97.

The brief and undistinguished career of the girl group Girls5eva ran aground when the quintet’s new album was released with the single “Quit Flying Planes in My Heart” on September 10, 2001. It was just as well: Girls5eva proclaimed they’d be young, famous and friends “five-ever,” but it was clear to all but its members that the group had a faster expiration date than the bandana top one of them wears on MTV’s TRL.

VidCon has tapped Nicole Leo as director of creator partnerships, organizers said Monday. In the role, Leo will lead the talent and creator partnerships team and manage relationships with online video creators and musicians, while generating programming for talent.

Since the shock and gore of his 2003 breakoutHigh Tensionushered him into the Splat Pack, Alexandre Aja has taken an entertaining detour with rip-roaring excursions into creature horror, in the self-explanatory Piranha 3D and the gators-in-a-hurricane disaster movie, Crawl. The French genre specialist abandons that gleefully schlocky B-movie throwback spirit but not the taut storytelling skills in Oxygen, a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller driven by Mélanie Laurent's gripping performance.

Meredith Corp. has reached an agreement to sell its local TV stations, or its Local Media Group, to Gray Television for $2.7 billion.

In the decade since the sexual assault case of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn involving a maid at the Sofitel in Manhattan (charges were later dropped and a settlement reached), panic button systems increasingly have been mandated to protect hotel employees against sexual misconduct, whether through collective bargaining — as negotiated by the New York Hotel Trades Council — or through ordinances in cities including Seattle, Miami, Long Beach and Santa Monica.

Doug Liman is spotlighting common tech issues in a spot for Verizon's 5G network that claims to leave these problems behind and be "built" for gamers. Dubbed The Reset, the spot emphasizes what happens when lagging, ghosting, glitches and texture stretching — issues that most video game players are well acquainted with — are transposed into the real world.

Chloé Zhao, Kelly Marie Tran, Riz Ahmed, Padma Lakshmi and others are being honored as a part of nonprofit collective Gold House's fourth annual A100 List to celebrate Asians and Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) and their impactfulcontributions to society.

Though the 2021 Tribeca Festival is set to take place largely in-person across New York City, the fest is making select films available to audiences throughout the U.S. via its newly launched online platform, Tribeca at Home.

It was almost exactly a year ago, in March 2020, atStudio Babelsberg Germany's largest film studio, located just outside Berlin.

Verizon is exiting the media business. The telecom giant is selling Yahoo, AOL and the remainder of its Verizon Media brands to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal announced Monday.

Netflix has unveiled the first image of 1899, the hotly-anticipated new mystery series from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, creators of global hit Dark. For their new show, Friese and Odar have gone back to the turn of the 20th century for a story set among European immigrants struggling to reach the "new world." The eight-episode series follows the mysterious circumstances around the voyage of an immigrant ship from Europe to New York.

Tom Jones is crowned on the U.K. albums chart this week with Surrounded By Time, and he sets a chart record in the process.

Los Angeles' New Beverly Cinema, which is owned and operated byQuentin Tarantino, has set a reopening. In a post shared on its social media channels and website Saturday, the historic revival theater (located on 7165 Beverly Blvd.)announced plans to reopen on June 1.

John Oliver wasted little time diving into his main story on Sunday's Last Week Tonight, spending most of his show debunking the myths surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines. Among the conspiracy theories he took on: Bill Gates is trying to implant microchips into the population.

Zhang Yimou's spy thriller Cliff Walkers was the best reviewed new release to open over China's lucrative May Day holiday weekend, but it was far from the biggest earner. Youth romance My Love, from Beijing Enlight Pictures, overcame withering reviews to dominate the start of the long holiday frame, earning $65.1 million from Friday to Sunday.