Todd Gilchrist Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Todd Gilchrist editor With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to identify moments that precipitated significant social or cultural changes. But that doesn’t mean that the people involved in those moments knew, or were actively working to achieve them, as they were happening.

Todd Gilchrist editor John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel reunited at the TCM Classic Film festival on Thursday for a 30th anniversary screening of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Pulp Fiction” to reflect on the film’s impact on their careers — and upon the medium itself. “It changed cinema, so it’s almost hard to have it sink in,” observed Uma Thurman, who joined Samuel L.

Todd Gilchrist editor As the star of “Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink” and “The Breakfast Club,” Molly Ringwald understands why she’s still considered “the patron saint of teenagers.” Commercially successful and critically acclaimed, those films — and her performances — depicted adolescents with an emotional sophistication like few films before them. But Ringwald was bringing that complexity to the screen from her first role in Paul Mazursky’s “Tempest,” and the fact that she’s continued to do so throughout her career is why she’s set to receive the Variety Creative Vanguard Award at the Miami Film Festival on April 6.

Todd Gilchrist editor If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. As studios and distributors chart a path for their wares that — at least for the foreseeable future — prioritizes streaming, collecting physical media continues to become an increasingly rarified hobby.

Todd Gilchrist editor The first teaser trailer for Fede Álvarez’ “Alien: Romulus,” released March 20, hints at a return to the same kinds of thrills that audiences experienced back in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s “Alien” — and that James Cameron delivered in the 1986 follow-up, “Aliens.” Opening with a parade of spaceships reminiscent of the Nostromo and Sulaco, the clip offers a first look at its young cast, which features Cailee Spaeny (“Priscilla”) and Isabela Merced (“Madame Web”). The crew navigates dimly-lit, hexagonal corridors, run from scurrying facehuggers, and deliver shrieks of fear that, despite the original film’s tagline (“In space, no one can hear you scream”), echo all too viscerally.

Todd Gilchrist editor Directed by Neo Sora, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus” records the final performance of its namesake composer and musician prior to his death from cancer in March 2023. Per Sora, Sakamoto’s son, “Opus” is less a documentary than a concert film, capturing 20 tracks — electronic, orchestral, and everything in between — from his multifaceted career as they’re played on the piano in crisp black and white, in lighting that transitions from night to day and back to night.

Todd Gilchrist editor “Always be two steps ahead,” repeatedly says Rachel Hyde, the famous alter ego of the namesake character in Hammer Studios’ “Doctor Jekyll.” The film’s director, Joe Stephenson, and his screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern don’t take her advice, and it’s much to the detriment of their contemporary adaptation of the 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson novella, which can’t decide singularly what Jekyll’s transformation is a metaphor for. All volunteered options are either obvious or severely undercooked.

Todd Gilchrist editor Visual albums — a bunch of videos strung together to commemorate the release of new work from a musical artist — typically either feel like shameless promotion or a vanity project. “Songs From the Hole” not only earns the label honestly, but actually takes this co-called next-level artistic endeavor to, well, another level: Chronicling the incarceration of James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who went to jail at age 15 for murder, co-writer and director Contessa Gayles combines nakedly vulnerable reflections from Jacobs with poetic recreations for a deeply affecting experience, both musically and dramatically.

Todd Gilchrist editor On April 30, Disney Home Entertainment will release on physical media four more of its streaming series, two from Lucasfilm and two from Marvel Studios. “Star Wars: Andor — The Complete First Season,” “Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi — The Complete Series,” “Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight: The Complete First Season” and “Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: The Complete First Season” will be released individually on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in collectible packaging.

Todd Gilchrist editor With her ninth album “This Is Me…Now,” Jennifer Lopez promised to be more honest and vulnerable than ever before — a bookend to 2002’s “This Is Me…Then” in which she would “tell her side” of the romances that for decades have been one-dimensionally splashed across the pages of tabloids worldwide. Even as a lifelong fan, I was skeptical just how far back she’d draw the curtain given the meticulous control she’s exerted over her career.

Todd Gilchrist editor The creative process can sometimes be highly organized, and others completely ephemeral: for every story that’s been mapped out beat by beat there’s another that arrived completely intact from a writer’s fingers in a feverish outpouring of inspiration. Somewhere in between these extremes is the unglamorous, frequently tedious work of chipping away at an idea, a sequence, or line of dialogue that gets to the heart of what a scribe wants to say — or more precisely, hopes to communicate.

Todd Gilchrist editor Jennifer Lopez has spent the better part of her career navigating the two halves of her public persona: Bronx-born girl next door “Jenny from the block” and Hollywood power player “J.Lo.” Though much of the tension between the two has been amplified by media coverage that spans calculated marketing campaigns and inescapable paparazzi scrutiny, Lopez has frequently seemed to capitulate to whichever of the two serves her best at the time. “This is Me…Now: A Love Story” is, on its face, the visual component of her self-funded ninth studio album, and at a reported $20 million price tag it’s easy to see it first and foremost as an advertisement.

Todd Gilchrist editor From a filmmaker’s perspective, it’s always fortuitous when the name of an artist’s signature work encapsulates the journey that they made in their life and career. What else to call a film about Johnny Cash? “Walk the Line,” of course.

Todd Gilchrist editor Ian McShane is 81, but you’d never know it watching him in “American Star.” Also a producer of director Gonzalo López-Gallego’s new film, the English actor plays Wilson, a seasoned assassin who visits the Canary Islands’ Fuerteventura for a job, but instead unexpectedly becomes involved in the life of a French expatriate (Nora Arnezeder) and the lonely child of a vacationing couple (Oscar Coleman). From the first scene, McShane dances across the screen with the same effortlessness of a performer a quarter of his age as his character reckons with an escalating series of disruptions to a sequence of events whose outcome is inevitable: someone dying of a bullet from his gun.

Todd Gilchrist editor “Miller’s Girl,” about a relationship that develops between a wise-beyond-her-years teenager and her intellectually undernourished teacher, feels like catnip for the circular discourse of Film Twitter, but it’s hard to tell where a study of post-#MeToo power dynamics will land with moviegoers in the real world. Written, produced and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the film is both impressively erudite and unrelentingly self-aware, a combination it bravely attempts but doesn’t quite fully balance.

Todd Gilchrist editor Although it isn’t structured any differently from dozens of other cradle-to-grave documentaries about artistic luminaries, “Luther: Never Too Much” sheds light on much more than just the life and career of R&B singer Luther Vandross. Drawn largely from interview and performance footage of Vandross over his almost 40 years in entertainment, and bolstered and contextualized by retrospective talks will collaborators and confidantes, director Dawn Porter’s film exposes some uneasy truths about the music industry and the media we may now know, but whose seeming ubiquitousness at the time he was alive may be difficult to fully comprehend.

Todd Gilchrist editor Michael Mann’s 12th film, “Ferrari” was always meant to do more than catalog the achievements of a legendary racing team and its automotive parent. Even so, its story climaxes with a pivotal race in the brand’s history — the 1957 Mille Miglia — that required a tremendous amount of work, and more than a little luck to recreate.

Variety staffers reflected on some of the most standout scenes from the year’s top contenders. For 2023, there’s been no shortage of imaginative and inspiring storytelling crafted by both award-winning pros and newcomers — and each one has gifted audiences memorable scenes that have left us laughing, crying, and with plenty to think about long after the credits have rolled.

Todd Gilchrist editor Great Christmas songs, and great versions of great Christmas songs, are as plentiful as letters to Santa Claus. It’s the holiday for which various-artists compilations were seemingly created (and why the two-disc set “Now That’s What I Call Christmas” was certified 6x platinum just three years after its 2001 release).

Todd Gilchrist editor Season one of “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” ended on an appropriately triumphant note with the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics in the 1980 NBA Championships. Not only was Jerry Buss (John C.

Todd Gilchrist editor Even among James Cameron’s epic and frequently arduous productions, from “Titanic’s” nine months of filming to the three years spent on “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “The Abyss” was particularly ambitious — and difficult: The 1989 thriller was shot almost entirely underwater, requiring its crew and cast to learn how to shoot, and act, while using diving equipment with which many of them were completely unfamiliar. “You show up to do a diving movie, you’re going to have to dive,” says Cameron in a new clip from bonus features accompanying the film’s digital release on Tuesday.

Todd Gilchrist editor In a year in which evaluating the contributions of writers became a major point of contention across the entertainment industry, Variety is especially pleased to announce its list of 10 Screenwriters to Watch. Some among them are scribes whose work has already made waves — cultural as much as commercial — with others on the precipice of transforming this year’s awards season and the broader landscape of film for years to come.

Todd Gilchrist editor Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” is a nesting doll of a film—a television broadcast of a documentary about a play, assembled with the same precision and detail as Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch” among others. Thematically, the connective tissue between its layers of reality, like many of those earlier films, is the notion and processing of loss.

Todd Gilchrist editor Intellectual property — the books, films, characters and properties that get butts into seats — has long been a cornerstone of Hollywood moviemaking. But many of this year’s films have drawn from less likely, though perhaps inevitable, sources of inspiration: products and brands.

Todd Gilchrist editor “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Punch-Drunk Love” and four more films from Columbia Pictures will make their 4K Ultra HD debut Feb. 13, 2024, via Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection Vol.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. “A Haunting in Venice” is getting a digital release just in time for Halloween. Kenneth Branagh‘s third Agatha Christie adaptation, which hit theaters in September, will debut on digital retailers and Hulu on Oct.

Todd Gilchrist editor For horror fans, Claudio Simonetti is a household name. First a founding member of rock group Goblin, whose work is synonymous with filmmaker Dario Argento’s genre standard-bearers “Deep Red” and “Suspiria,” a producer and pop artist in his native Italy, and later a lead composer on Argento’s “Tenebre,” Lamberto Bava’s “Demons” and more, Simonetti and his collaborators turned iconoclastic takes on scoring — utilizing the sounds of prog rock and disco — into iconic pieces of film music.

Todd Gilchrist editor It’s been a long, hard road to Offset’s third solo album. Originally scheduled for release in November 2022 before the shooting death of fellow Migos member Takeoff, “Set It Off” shows major artistic growth for the Atlanta rapper and sets a new course for him as a solo artist — and features top-level collaborations from Travis Scott, Future, Don Tolliver, Latto, his wife Cardi B and more, and production from hitmakers like Metro Boomin, Boi-1da and Vinylz.

Todd Gilchrist editor In “Caligula: The Ultimate Cut,” absolute power corrupts absolutely, but even using absolutely all of the footage shot for the notorious production back in 1976 does not necessarily result in a better film. The most expensive independent film ever produced until that time, “Caligula” was conceived by late Penthouse founder Bob Guccione as a sexually explicit film that also featured real actors and high production values; hiring bestselling author Gore Vidal to write a script for Italian avant-garde director Tinto Brass (“Salon Kitty”), Guccione subsequently attracted such respected thespians as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren to star.

Todd Gilchrist editor As costs spiral upward for production infrastructure, visual effects and good old fashioned star wattage, blockbuster budgets tend to be one of the closely guarded secrets in Hollywood. Yet in the weeks and months leading to the release of “The Creator,” due Sept.