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Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Chang Can Dunk” doesn’t go the way you’d expect, and that’s a good thing. Here’s a Disney movie about a 5-foot-8-inch Chinese American high school basketball player who bets his rival that he can dunk by the end of the season. He gets his wish about an hour in (that’s neither spoiler nor surprise, since the title literally tells us that Chang can dunk), but there’s still a long way for the character to go — and grow — in a film that believes maturity isn’t achieved by shortcuts. The result marks the attention-worthy debut of writer-director Jingyi Shao, and exemplifies the sort of movies Disney should be making: It has its values in the right place, but doesn’t pretend its hero is perfect. If there’s a villain in “Chang Can Dunk,” that role is arguably filled by the title character (tenaciously embodied by Bloom Li, who keeps us wondering how to feel about Chang). In time, the obsessive teen’s ultra-competitive personality winds up alienating practically everyone in his life, except demanding single mom Chen (an excellent Mardy Ma), whose tough-love approach only amplifies his resentment.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Los Angeles-based Italian director Andrea Pallaoro’s delicate drama “Monica” is finally set to open in U.S. theaters via IFC following its world premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival. The film starring transgender actor Trace Lysette (“Transparent”) as a woman who returns home to the Midwest to care for her dying mother, played by Patricia Clarkson, marked the first time an openly-transgender actress headlined a Venice competition title. In “Monica” Lysette plays a woman who from Los Angeles goes back to her suburban midwest home for the first time since she was a teenager to care for her mom who had rejected her when she transitioned.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Americans spend tens of billions of dollars on basketball sneakers every year. Sure, everybody needs shoes, but it shouldn’t matter if your choice bears the Nike swoosh, Adidas’ three stripes or the Converse star. In most cases, consumers aren’t simply buying footwear; they’re investing in the fantasy of walking in someone else’s shoes — a sports star or personal idol — of believing that switching one’s kicks has a direct impact on your potential for greatness. As the Nike marketing gurus in Ben Affleck’s “Air” put it, “A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into.” If you’ve been alive on earth in the last 40 years, then you already know what happened when a rookie named Michael Jordan let Nike put his name and likeness on their shoes. But “Air” isn’t about convincing the greatest basketball player in the history of the game to sign with Nike, although a “Jerry Maguire”-desperate Matt Damon — as paunchy, flop-sweating Sonny Vaccaro — might trick you into thinking this is just the (admittedly very entertaining) anatomy of a landmark business deal.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In 1993, “The Joy Luck Club” made Hollywood history, proving to a skeptical — and let’s face it, racist — industry that there was mainstream demand for a culturally sensitive Chinese American ensemble drama. Three decades later, along comes “Joy Ride,” throwing sensitivity to the wind en route to obliterating any remaining barriers. Like “Girls Trip” with an all-Asian-American cast, the Seth Rogen-produced, hard-R road movie follows small-town besties Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) to Beijing, where they tackle everything from taboo tattoos to a devil’s threesome with all the gusto you’d hope or expect from “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writer Adele Lim’s directorial debut.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Peacock continues to expand its growing library of films with “Knock at the Cabin,” which will stream exclusively on the NBC platform starting March 24. The M. Night Shyamalan thriller, starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and Rupert Grint, follows three family members who are camping in the woods and are suddenly interrupted by four strangers with visions of an impending apocalypse. The only way to prevent the end of the world, they claim, is to have the family willingly kill one of their own. The movie collected $14.2 million in its opening weekend in February, enough to top box office charts and dethrone “Avatar: The Way of Water.” It also landed a promising “A-” CinemaScore from ticket buyers. 

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic At last, a video game movie that’s more than just a video game movie. In theory, “Tetris” — that primitive and highly addictive block-stacking strategy game — doesn’t lend itself to the big-screen treatment any more than Rubik’s Cube or Tic-Tac-Toe might. But Noah Pink has found an ingenious solution to a classic puzzle. The screenwriter realized that there’s more to Tetris than most people knew. Namely, there’s a terrific backstory about how this Soviet-hatched computer software made its way over the Iron Curtain, and telling it could play like a Cold War thriller as three teams of Western rivals race one another to Russia to secure the rights.

Charna Flam The so-called “crackberry” is back. IFC Films has released the first official trailer for the upcoming comedy-drama film, “BlackBerry,” which provides a peek into exactly how the handheld device revolutionized the cell phone industry. Director Matt Johnson, along with co-screenwriter Matthew Miller, adapted Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” for the big screen. Johnsonplays BlackBerry co-founder Douglas Fregin in the film, alongside Glenn Howerton as chair and co-CEO Jim Balsillie, Jay Baruchel as co-founder Mike Lazaridis and Cary Elwes as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski. The cast also includes Saul Rubinek, Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer, Michelle Giroux, Mark Critch and SungWon Cho.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Two days after ”Everything Everywhere All at Once“ won seven Oscars, including best picture, the SXSW Film Festival, where Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s movie launched last year, has announced its own awards. To be clear, “EEAAO” was a studio-backed opening night premiere (not one of the smaller movies launched in competition at the indie-focused fest), but you can still feel the excitement in Austin around the landmark Oscar win. After all, SXSW was the first festival to take Daniels seriously, awarding them top prize for their Battles music video (“My Machines”) in 2012. Will any of the movies or directors screening here this year go on to change film history?

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Some folks have it easy, and others make life difficult for themselves. Guess which type “Problemista” is about. The perpetually unsatisfied title character, a demanding New York art critic played by Tilda Swinton as a hag with hair the color of hibiscus tea, is obsessed with archiving the life’s work of her late husband (RZA), who left behind a series of egg paintings no one seems to understand. Swinton feels like a future Halloween costume in search of a movie in writer-director Julio Torres’ overly kooky and all-too-quixotic debut — another attention-deficit comedy from the studio that made “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” except that Torres lacks the technical experience to pull off even a fraction of the ideas to which he aspires.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If they ever make a sequel to “The Celluloid Closet” — the landmark doc about the history of LGBT representation on screen — Lukas Gage should warrant at least two mentions. First, there’s the scene from the first season of “White Lotus” where Jake Lacy barges into the resort manager’s office, only to find Gage getting his salad tossed (a history-making moment for gay TV fans). And now there’s “Down Low,” an over-the-top, bottom-trawling comedy that wants to be for the gay community what “The Hangover” was to the mainstream — which is to say, wildly irreverent and incredibly wrong. Starring openly gay “Heroes” villain Zachary Quinto as Gary, a recently divorced, richie-rich zaddy hoping for a happy ending, “Down Low” doesn’t quite understand its own title — code within the Black and Latino community for men who consider themselves straight while having sex with other men — but that’s OK. “Down Low” is still light-years ahead of mainstream movies (including last year’s “Bros”) as debuting feature director Rightor Doyle delivers what an entire contingent of queer audiences have been asking for all their lives: namely, a comedy that’s as raunchy and inappropriate as the jokes they make between themselves. While nowhere near as extreme (or enjoyable) as 2009’s “I Love You Phillip Morris,” it’s still a rare enough occurrence to earn a dedicated following.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Don’t trust anything you see or hear in “Hypnotic,” a noggin-jogging thriller with more twists than Minnie’s tightly braided ponytail. Who’s Minnie? She’s the girl who goes missing in the movie’s opening scene, while police detective dad Daniel Rourke (Ben Affleck) looks away for a second. Or does she? Depending how your mind works, there’s a chance Minnie doesn’t even exist. The perp was caught, but Minnie’s body was never found — which is a clue that this wasn’t a typical disappearance. Your typical popcorn-munching multiplex patron would never suspect how deep this Russian-doll mystery goes. Better to strap in and go along for the ride in the latest example of creativity-within-constraints from resourceful writer-director Robert Rodriguez. Taking a page from “The Matrix,” “Limitless” and “Memento” — along with whole chapters from sci-fi trickster Philip K. Dick — this slick mix of special effects and practical ingenuity puts Affleck in a fun position, and the slightly grizzled star’s still got the clench-jawed charisma to pull it off.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic There are movies made during the pandemic, and movies made because the pandemic, and though debuting director Jake Johnson had been kicking around the idea for “Self Reliance” for years, it took COVID to motivate him to make it. Why? Because the “New Girl” actor’s absurdist concept — about a sad-sack bored enough with his life that he agrees to risk it in a “Most Dangerous Game”-style reality show — assumed both profundity and relevance as soon as the species went into lockdown. Coming up for connection, Johnson delivers a silly and frequently surprising why-we-need-people parable. The helmer plays Tommy, who’s been a passive bystander in his own life for as long as he can remember, until one day famous dude Andy Samberg (who also happens to be among the film’s producers) randomly pulls up in a stretch limo and offers Tommy a ride. Should he take it? Probably not, but Tommy’s bored enough to accept, agreeing to meet a pair of eccentric producers who inform him that he’s been selected for a chance to win a million dollars. All he has to do is survive for 30 days, while a team of highly trained “hunters” try to take him out.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Americans can’t get enough of processed corn. They eat it for breakfast, in cereal form, and all throughout the day, snacking on cookies and crackers and chips, often washing it down with soda (sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, naturally). Premiering at the SXSW Film Festival, “Flamin’ Hot” tells the backstory of Frito-Lay’s insanely popular, ultra-spicy line of snack chips — the ones that singe your taste buds and stain your fingers a radioactive red — as marketing guru Richard Montañez lays it out in his memoir, “A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive.” After a rough start selling drugs and hustling on the streets of East Los Angeles, Montañez got a job cleaning the machines at Frito-Lay’s Rancho Cucamonga plant and worked his way up to head of Multicultural marketing. Along the way, he may or may not have invented the recipe for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Doritos, et al.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic How long does a documentary need to be? Frederick Wiseman frequently goes long, and Oscar-winning “OJ: Made in America” ran nearly eight hours. Lately, with “Bill Russell: Legend” and “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker,” streamers have embraced the so-called “two-part documentary” — a fancy term for what used to be called a miniseries. So, while there are no limits on how much longer docs can get, it’s refreshing to see a compelling subject covered in 40 minutes or less, and doubly rewarding to realize that four of the five packaged in ShortsTV’s “2023 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentary” found audiences on their own merits, even without theatrical distribution.

Variety asked editors Peter Debruge, Clayton Davis, Tim Gray, and Jenelle Riley, to answer four questions about this past year in film and discuss its standout moments. The questions are: 1. How would you rate 2022’s films against previous years? 2. What was the most important issue this year for the industry?  3. What film inspired you the most this year?

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic While Peter Farrelly was off winning Oscars for “Green Book,” younger brother Bobby has been largely absent from feature directing. It’s been nearly a decade since the siblings shared credit — the last time being 2014’s “Dumb and Dumber To.” Now, rather than competing with Peter at the respectability game, Bobby sticks to what he knows with “Champions,” in which Woody Harrelson plays a minor-league basketball coach court-ordered to assist a Special Olympics team for 90 days — just long enough to take the team from bumbling incompetents to national finalists. There are zero surprises in “Champions,” unless you count the not-inconsiderable shock that such a movie exists at all. A remake of 2018 Spanish box office sensation “Campeones,” this awkward (if presumably well-intentioned) comedy might have felt enlightened 25 years ago — back when “Forrest Gump” was an Oscar favorite — but today makes for a patronizing portrayal of people with intellectual disabilities. That’s still better than no portrayal at all, I suppose, and there’s some satisfaction to be had in watching Harrelson’s character overcome his prejudices — reflected by using the “boo-boo word” that starts with “R” — and grow to see these amateur athletes for more than their limitations. But did the film (little more than a “Role Models” redux) have to paint its players as such extreme incompetents from the outset?

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic As a critic, I’m always looking for a fresh challenge, which is one reason I took up writing about theater: It still has the capacity to scare me. I’ve reviewed nearly 1,700 movies in my time at Variety, but how to weigh in with authority on stage productions of William Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett when I haven’t seen most of their work performed, but know it only by reputation? Last year, I was nervous going in to a fresh revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse, as I had only the Mike Nichols movie as a reference point. How to judge Calista Flockhart’s performance, and what might I compare it to, not having seen Uta Hagen play Martha on Broadway? (I did manage to track down a vinyl recording of that show, but still…

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Of the 10 films up for best picture, no fewer than six run 199 minutes or more. On one extreme, James Cameron’s punishing “Avatar” sequel is long enough to require bathroom breaks. At the other, Daniels’ ADHD-styled “Everything Everywhere All at Once” proves equally exhausting, dedicating every hyperkinetic second to stimulating easily distracted audiences. It’s enough to make folks grateful for the lower-profile but still engaging live-action shorts category, where nominees are bound by a strict 40-minute time limit. This year’s crop — the so-so “2023 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live Action” program — clocks in at under two hours. Available in theaters and on myriad streaming platforms, the international assembly may be a hit-and-miss affair, but never outstays its welcome.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “32 Sounds,” an immersive and experiential documentary, has sold North American rights to Abramorama following its premiere at Sundance Film Festival. The movie, which explores the phenomenon of sound through 32 specific sonic experiences, will begin its nationwide theatrical rollout at New York City’s Film Forum on April 28. To complete the unique auditory experience, several venues, including Film Forum, will offer audience members individual sets of headphones so they can watch “32 Sounds” the way the filmmaker intended. “32 Sounds” had its world premiere at Sundance, where it played to positive reviews. Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge wrote that the movie is “bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity” and praised it as a “rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.”

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic On Oscar night, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” will almost certainly win the Academy Award for feature animation. For many of those following along at home, it will look as though the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water” is being rewarded for some kind of secondary passion, as if del Toro had scaled Everest and then set his sights on a smaller peak on which to plant his flag. But that’s not how it happened at all. Way back in Mexico, del Toro started his filmmaking career doing animated shorts: Obsessed with Ray Harryhausen, the amateur future auteur built rudimentary armatures, painstakingly repositioning the puppets one frame at a time. Decades later, once established in Hollywood, del Toro accepted a side gig at DreamWorks Animation, serving as a story consultant on films such as “Megamind” and “Kung Fu Panda 2” as a pretext for teaching himself the trade. With “Pinocchio,” he put those lessons to work on a stop-motion passion project that’s every bit as challenging as his most impressive films.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Presented largely from the point of view of two children, Mexican director Lila Avilés’ intimate, emotionally rich Berlin competition entry “Tótem” immerses audiences in a boisterous family gathering, where a handful of adult siblings have gathered to celebrate the birthday of their brother, a painter named Tonatiuh (Mateo Garcia). “Tona” is barely seen for most of the movie, confined to a back room where he refuses visitors. Naturally, this confuses 7-year-old Sol (Naíma Sentíes), who spends the day wandering the house alone, building a pillow fort in the living room or collecting snails in the garden. “Sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t love me when he says he doesn’t want to see me,” Sol confides to her father’s trusted nurse, Cruz (Teresita Sánchez, the lone carryover from Avilés’ exceptional 2018 debut, “The Chambermaid”). Your heart can’t help but break a little in that moment, for by this time, Avilés has already provided enough clues for us to sketch out the rough situation in our heads.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Global indie streamer distributor and producer MUBI has acquired all rights in several key European territories to “Passages,” the erotic drama by Ira Sachs that bowed with a splash at Sundance and just had its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Following the world premiere of “Passages” at Sundance MUBI last month snapped up all rights for the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Latin America to the U.S. indie darling director’s first film shot in France. Now MUBI has acquired additional European territories on “Passages” including for Germany, Austria, Italy, Turkey and Benelux. The Benelux pickup is in partnership with Belgium’s Imagine Film Distribution.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Luther: The Fallen Sun” starts by punishing its protagonist — scruffy, cross-the-line Detective Chief Inspector John Luther (Idris Elba) — for all his past sins after the franchise’s latest villain, played by Andy Serkis, releases details of Luther’s rule-bending tactics to the media. On the phone with some kind of Estonian henchman, Serkis’ Robey implies that it will be tricky to dig up the dirt on Luther because “he doesn’t have much of an online presence,” but the next thing we know, Luther’s being tossed into a high-security prison. Guess they got their hands on the past five seasons of the BBC Television series. Or maybe the last episode was enough — although we won’t retroactively give it away here, for those who haven’t dedicated the past dozen years to following Luther’s exploits. Suffice to say, this was the role that got people speculating that Elba might make a suitable replacement when Daniel Craig decided to retire his license to kill. Like Craig’s 21st-century 007, Luther was a darker, more tortured kind of action hero, torn between a constipated psychology and his locomotive drive to capture and punish wrongdoers.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Tapping into the Japanese national zeitgeist once again with “Suzume,” writer-director Makoto Shinkai surpasses his peers in making films for and about teenagers. Now 50 years old, the anime master christened his latest blockbuster after its heroine, Suzume Iwato (voiced by Nanoka Hara), a 17-year-old orphan on the southwestern island of Kyushu swept up in a cross-country trip to prevent a series of natural disasters. That such a responsibility should fall to someone so young is typical of his oeuvre (see “Weathering With You”), but also an apt way of illustrating the lingering trauma and vulnerability that adolescents feel in many parts of Japan. Funnier and more streamlined than Shinkai’s earlier hypercharged toon epics, “Suzume” is a massive hit in its home country, where it has earned more than $100 million since opening last November — his third film to pass that milestone. The film made its international premiere at the Berlinale, one of two animated features in official competition (the other being Chinese director Liu Jian’s “Art College 1994”). Theatrical releases are scheduled to follow in most countries on or around April 13.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The first rule of “Manodrome” is you don’t talk about “Fight Club.” “Fight Club” looms large over writer-director John Trengrove’s unsettling second feature, even if no one overtly mentions David Fincher’s provocative late-’90s movie in this dark psychological-thriller-cum-social-critique, which finds the state of masculinity even more fraught than Fincher did a quarter-century ago. Trengrove, who is gay and hails from South Africa (his 2017 debut “The Wound” was shortlisted for the Oscar international prize), brings a queer sensibility to his otherwise unsatisfying analysis of contemporary manhood, enlisting Jesse Eisenberg to play yet another scrawny white guy seeking outlet for deep wells of festering aggression.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened? Frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy, “BlackBerry” spins comedy from the seat-of-their-pants launch and subsequent flame-out of “that phone that people had before they bought an iPhone,” as one character puts it. Directed by Matt Johnson — the renegade mock-doc helmer responsible for 2013 Slamdance winner “The Dirties” and moon-landing hoax “Project Avalanche” — from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, this sly tech-world satire freely extrapolates from journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal,” refashioning that wild ride into something that approximates their favorite movies.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Nick Lieberman, a writer and director on the breakout Sundance comedy “Theater Camp,” has signed with Range Media Partners for representation. Sold out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival to Searchlight for $8 million and guaranteed a theatrical release, the feature earned an ensemble prize from the U.S. Dramatic jury. Equal parts scathing satire and heartwarming camp adventure for child performers, “Theater Camp” stars Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Gavlin, Patti Harrison, Jimmy Tatro and Ayo Edebiri. Lieberman and Gordon directed from a script by Lieberman, Platt, Galvin and Gordon. Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum produced via Gloria Sanchez Productions along with Erik Feig’s Picturestart. The film will screen at the forthcoming South by Southwest film festival before hitting theaters later this year.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Harry Potter” has had many imitators, but none so blatant or irredeemably over-the-top as Netflix franchise starter “The School for Good and Evil,” an extravagant YA costume show from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig that follows two friends to an elite academy where the heroes and villains of future fairy tales are trained. The whole idea derives from a book series by Soman Chainani, though it’s obvious where it really comes from: the imagination of J.K. Rowling, who must be positively livid watching what looks like the most expensive episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” ever produced. Feig goes full camp here, casting Kerry Washington and Charlize Theron to play the decked-out divas who oversee the enchanted institution’s two sides. The former embodies Professor Dovey, a prissy headmistress in Tweety Bird-yellow threads, who’s always going on about the rules, while Theron’s evil-minded Lady Lesso takes her fashion cues from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Joined by Laurence Fishburne (as the Morpheus-like School Master), Michelle Yeoh (largely wasted as some kind of beauty instructor) and Cate Blanchett (in voice only, as the film’s self-aware narrator), these stars have been given carte blanche to chew the scenery.

J. Kim Murphy The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe may be about to change with “Black Adam,” but the new film is landing low on the hierarchy of critical reputation for Warner Bros.’ last decade of superhero entries. With reviews hitting for the Dwayne Johnson vehicle this afternoon, “Black Adam” currently stands at a mediocre 30% approval rating from top critics on the the review-aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. Should the number stand, it would mark the lowest such figure for a DC film since 2017’s “Justice League,” which netted a 23% approval rating from top critics and was so reviled among fans that a reworked version was eventually ordered by Warner Bros., arriving in the form of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” in 2021.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers for “Black Adam.” It’s kind of a cheat, casting someone as massive as Dwayne Johnson to play a DC superhero — or antihero, in the case of “Black Adam,” an action-packed, adolescent-skewing standalone that presents the swole Samoan star as a nearly invincible global threat. Black Adam is basically an A-bomb in human form, whose emergence from a 5,000-year lockdown calls for emergency intervention by the Justice Society of America, or “JSA,” which dispatches four glorified bench-warmers to contain the situation: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge, gruff), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo, doofy), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell, colorful) and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan, the standout, even if his character reads like a second-rate Doctor Strange).