Peter Debruge Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Valerie Wu Intern Guess Joy is hard at work for Pixar fans, because “Inside Out 2” has just dropped its first trailer. “Inside Out 2” is the sequel to 2015’s animated coming-of-age film “Inside Out.” The first film centered on 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and the five emotions in her brain, led by a star-studded cast: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Fear (Bill Hader) and Anger (Lewis Black). In the sequel trailer, a new emotion is introduced: the frazzled, orange Anxiety.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If John Woo had permitted the characters in “Silent Night” to speak, chances are that audiences would laugh them off the screen. Instead, the director gets right down to business, opening with a wordless chase sequence in which a sad dad (Joel Kinnaman) in a corny Christmas sweater sprints after a pair of speeding cars.

Caroline Brew editor Makoto Shinkai discussed his inspirations for establishing the tone of “Suzume” and how he approached themes of natural disaster in a conversation for Variety’s Artisans Screening Series moderated by Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge and translated by Mikey McNamara. Shinkai revealed that with “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” being grouped together as “Barbenheimer,” he expected “Barbie” to carry a similar seriousness to “Oppenheimer.” Thus, he was surprised to see how comedic the film was.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more,” observes one of the human characters in “Charlotte’s Web,” a kiddie classic that serves as both the butt of several jokes and an inspiration for Adam Sandler’s animated “Leo,” an endearing Netflix original that strikes just the right balance between heart and fart jokes. Basing the way Leo sounds on his squeaky-scratchy, slightly guttural impression of the late Hollywood agent Bernie Brillstein, Sandler voices a crusty old iguana who’s spent three-quarters of a century — practically his entire life — trapped in an elementary school classroom.

Joaquin Phoenix reportedly “walked out” of the premiere of his new film Napoleon earlier this week.The historical drama stars Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role as Napoleon Bonaparte, the military mastermind and Emperor of France. It spans 32 years from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to Napoleon’s death on St Helena in 1821, and explores significant battles as well as the romantic turmoil with his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais.Phoenix was spotted walking out of the film’s premiere in Paris on Tuesday (November 14) before it started.

Napoleon, with generally favourable reviews across the board.The historical drama stars Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role as Napoleon Bonaparte, the military mastermind and Emperor of France. It spans 32 years from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to Napoleon’s death on St Helena in 1821, and explores significant battles as well as the romantic turmoil with his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais.Many have praised director Scott for crafting the kind of bombastic spectacle favoured in late ’50s and early ’60s Hollywood, noting in particular the technical and theatrical skill enacted for the sweeping, bloody battle scenes.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A chyron that appears at the end of “Napoleon,” after two and a half hours of turgid spectacle and grime-encrusted showmanship, informs that France’s self-anointed emperor oversaw 61 battles, listing the six that director Ridley Scott opted to stage for our benefit … or for his own glory. The director’s motives are unclear, much like those of Napoleon Bonaparte as played by Joaquin Phoenix, who gives a mumbly and oddly anti-charismatic performance as the figure — short, slender and something of an outsider, owing to his Corsican birth — who came to rule France after the revolution.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Christmas comes early this year, as “Journey to Bethlehem” puts words (and music) in the mouths of all who bore witness to Jesus’ birth. Some of those tunes — like “Silent Night” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” — will sound familiar enough, though most of the songs — like most of the script — represents a fresh interpretation of believers’ original miracle, courtesy of Adam Anders, making a competent, if undistinguished directorial debut with the least edgy retelling of the nativity story around (which is essentially what the faith-based audience has been asking for).

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Nicolas Cage is one of the internet’s most beloved actors. Social media platforms like X/Twitter and Reddit are constantly flooded with clips of and tributes to his larger-than-life performances. Google “Nicolas Cage memes” and you get list upon list devoted to the Oscar-winning actor.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s a loaded symbol in an imagined conversation between world-famous “sex doc” Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins, in irritable curmudgeon mode) and converted atheist C.S.

Jaden Thompson Joe Hunting, director of the HBO film “We Met In Virtual Reality,” is starting a production company called Painted Clouds, focusing exclusively on virtual reality filmmaking. The company aims to create original films and series using real time VR, including the popular platform VRChat.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Like “Testament” — the 1983 made-for-TV movie that imagined the fallout, both nuclear and psychological, after an atomic bomb is dropped on American soil — “Leave the World Behind” depicts a plausible doomsday scenario from the perspective of a handful of ordinary characters. Not military experts, not scientists, but two families obliged to shelter under the same roof out in the East Hamptons while something scary unfolds a few hours away, off-screen, in New York.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic With “Leo,” Indian director Lokesh Kanagaraj adds another “badass” to the growing network of formidable action heroes he calls the “Lokesh Cinematic Universe.” How do we know this guy’s a badass? Because the Tamil film’s techno soundtrack tells us so, chanting “Leo Das is a badass!” before even establishing who Leo Das is. By this time, the character in question has already wrestled a wild hyena into submission with his bare hands.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic When DreamWorks’ original “Trolls” movie was released, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the studio was launching a musical franchise. The rainbow-bright computer-animated feature boasted a sparkly soundtrack and the voice of Justin Timberlake as grumpy, gray-skinned Branch, but it wasn’t until the sequel — “Trolls World Tour,” released straight to streaming during the pandemic — that the series explicitly embraced its top-40 ’tude.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In America, doing what Andy Lau does in Hong Kong film industry satire “The Movie Emperor” would likely net him an Oscar nomination. Or at least an MTV Movie Award.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic One fan drove all the way from Louisiana to Little Rock to see the new Austin Butler movie, “The Bikeriders,” hoping the “Elvis” star might show up. Unfortunately, the ongoing actors strike prevented Butler from attending Filmland, a local industry fundraiser that hosted the Arkansas premiere of the film earlier this week — a rowdy portrait of a 1960s motorcycle gang freely inspired by a book of photos New Journalism pioneer Danny Lyon took while embedded with the Outlaws.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In 2016, John le Carré published a memoir called “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which the late spy novelist — who died in late 2020 — claims had been the working title of nearly all his books at some point. For le Carré, the term describes the passage through which naive birds of sport were forced from their nests, only to emerge as targets for marksmen waiting with rifles poised at a hotel in Monte Carlo.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “The Bikeriders,” a drama starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Tom Hardy and directed by Jeff Nichols, has been delayed amid the ongoing actors’ strike. Disney and 20th Century were scheduled to open the film on Dec. 1 but it’s been taken off the calendar for now.

Between the Rains and The Echo are among the big winners at the prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas.

American Fiction” from writer, director and producer Cord Jefferson, and the recent winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison,” a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired narratives and themes. After he writes an outlandish book making fun of the offensive tropes, his success propels him into the center of hypocrisy.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Aardman hatched its first feature, and the generation that flipped for “Chicken Run” — tickled by the novelty of watching a pseudo-serious genre movie rendered silly by an ensemble of stop-motion poultry — has grown up to be parents. Distributed by DreamWorks, the 2000 toon reimagined “The Great Escape” with chickens, as a doomed flock schemed to fly the coop of a WWII-style concentration camp run by the intimidating Mrs.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island. There are jokes, of course, and educated guesses, but the best most of us can do is search inside ourselves for the answer.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Godfrey Reggio, creator of the Qatsi trilogy, has been down this road before. The obsessions are familiar — nature’s innocence corrupted by industry, technology and the atomic age — but the audience is presumably different.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What would a monk want with a gun? Bringing wisdom and a streak of wry humor to his Bhutan-set sophomore feature, “The Monk and the Gun” director Pawo Choyning Dorji teases any number of possible answers to that question over the course of a droll, shrewdly satirical fable, in which Western values crash against a seemingly intransigent (but potentially more enlightened) South Asian culture. A gifted storyteller who keeps audiences guessing about his characters’ motives until the surprising moment everything comes together, Dorji was born in Bhutan, but attended university in Wisconsin.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains spoilers about the reason for all the killing. Years ago, Indian director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat fell asleep on a cross-country train ride, only to discover upon reaching his destination that the cars on either side of his had been robbed by armed bandits, known as “dacoits.” The heist couldn’t have been too intense, or it would have awakened him, but it got the helmer’s gears turning about what a truly terrifying train raid might look like. The answer: “Kill,” in which a crew of 40-odd thieves board a train, intending to steal passengers’ watches and phones, then turn bloodthirsty after running into a pair of hardheaded commandos.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Shia LaBeouf doesn’t appear until more than 20 minutes into “Henry Johnson,” a new David Mamet play making its world premiere at the Electric Lodge in Venice, Calif. The play amounts to just four scenes, barely more than an hour in all (plus an unnecessary 15-minute intermission). LaBeouf is on stage for just two of them, but the instant the film star materializes, something electric happens.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Werner Herzog has traveled to the ends of the earth for his art, rolling cameras in places rarely seen by human eyes — from rapids along the Amazon River for 1972’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” to the rim of an active volcano in Antarctica. But what’s inside Herzog’s head is what fascinates fans of the German director. As revealed in a new memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” (the phrase served as the original title of his 1974 film “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser”), Herzog’s far-ranging filmography represents only a fraction of the encounters and adventures that have shaped his worldview.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “The Successor” — a provocative psychological thriller with a lot more actual psychology than the genre typically offers — Paris-based fashion designer Ellias Barnès (Marc-André Grondin) stands on the precipice of a breakthrough in his career. He’s poised to take his place as creative director of the fashion house Orsino, following the death of its eponymous founder. If this were a tale of corporate ambition (à la “Succession”), or perhaps a Roman palace intrigue, here is the moment that Ellias would assume the throne.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The creator of “The Creator,” Gareth Edwards, started his filmmaking career teaching himself VFX at home. He’s an innovator on that front, devising ways to generate creepy CG monsters for “Monsters” more than a dozen years ago, then overseeing deceptively massive blockbusters, like “Godzilla,” ever since (deceptive because much of that stunning scale comes from virtual detail added in post).

Sophia Scorziello editor Cannes darling “May December” has unveiled its first trailer starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton. Directed by filmmaker Todd Haynes, the film first premiered back in May and is set for a limited theatrical release before hitting Netflix. “May December” is based loosely on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau, an American teacher charged with having a sexual relationship with one of her 12-year-old students.