Culture, style, and media — the stories, sounds, and scenes shaping the conversation.

Letterboxd, the cinephile social media platform for sharing movie reviews, went down Sunday morning, leaving users locked out of their accounts. Users who opened the Letterboxd app early Sunday found themselves signed out of their profiles. Entering account information and trying

Chilean duo Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña made a dream nightmare debut with “The Wolf House,” a stop-motion fantasy that turned heads both with its wholly original design — incorporating claymation, puppetry and papier-mâché to palpably handmade but immersively surreal effect

Monica Bellucci’s sneer is a thing of wonder, so why have so few directors used it properly? When allowed full rein to her sense of irony, as given her by Giovanni Tortorici in “Ketticè,” Bellucci has few equals in her ability to project self-aware drama queen with just the right

On today’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, expands on the evolution of the Peacock streamer and his view of the “the great re-bundling” that is underway for streaming media. Strauss, who is a 22-year veteran of

A coalition group campaigning against the proposed merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery has said the U.K.’s approval of the merger after obtaining “major concessions” lends “powerful credibility” to the pending legal case in the U.S. Earlier this week the U.K.

Video game publisher Take-Two Interactive drew $1.39 billion in sales from April 1-June 30, the quarter during which it opened presales for “Grand Theft Auto 6.” That figure is not broken down by title, but Take-Two notes the “largest contributors” to the overall number were “‘NB

On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Variety’s Corbin Bolies reports from Las Vegas where he is covering the AI4 conference with a slew of top leaders and true believers. The excitement around generative AI is still as hot as the temperature in Sin City, but the polariz

Netflix has announced the sprawling cast for the third chapter in Adam Sandler’s “Grown Ups” saga. The new installment is set to bring back Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Maya Rudolph, Maria Bello and Salma Hayek Pinault as the leads from the previo

Court is back in session.  CBS Media Ventures has released the trailer for “Adam’s Law,” a new syndicated daytime court show led by Judge Adam Levy, son of the famed TV jurist Judge Judy, aka Judith Sheindlin. The series is set to premiere Sept. 14 in first-run syndication, distr

Ariana Grande has earned her seventh No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with “Petal,” which bows in the top spot with 295,000 equivalent album units, her best opening-week figure this decade. “Petal” and its songs and videos have been the topic of considerable conversation —

When “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” director Jane Schoenbrun described their vision for the bloody one-take sequence in which Little Death (Jack Haven) massacres an entire summer camp — all set to Counting Crows’ 1996 rock ballad “A Long December” — they said it should fe

The suits of Hollywood are used to big numbers. That’s how they roll. But the record-setting opening weekend of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” isn’t something that happens every day, or every year — more like once a decade. Domestically, the film enjoyed the biggest opening weekend

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” and New Jersey entertainment and retail center American Dream will open a real-life Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza location in East Rutherford, N.J., in 2027. Based on the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise, the immersive restaurant experience is a functional r

Florian Hoffmann’s “Yazz,” about a teenager growing up in a UN compound in the Central African Republic, celebrated two major wins at this year’s Locarno Pro Awards for the Alliance 4 Development co-development platform for projects from Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switze

What does Steve Carell have to do for Emmy voters to take notice? In recent years, he’s died in car accidents twice (Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and Netflix’s “Four Seasons”), been a billionaire with incurable cancer (HBO’s “Mountainhead”) and a therapist held hostage by his ho

“The Odyssey” has notched two major box office milestones over the weekend. The big-budget adaptation of Homer’s original epic is officially Christopher Nolan’s biggest movie ever, with $1.1 billion, ranking ahead of 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises” with $1.08 billion, not adjusted

LOCARNO, Switzerland —  Cross-ocean love story “Spring Story” and false miracle comedy “The Surubí,” won big at Locarno’s 2026 pix-in-post First Look focus on Uruguay, sharing its top five prizes at a Sunday evening Aug. 9 awards ceremony.  The industry plaudits went to two of th

Letterboxd, the cinephile social media platform for sharing movie reviews, went down Sunday morning, leaving users locked out of their accounts. Users who opened the Letterboxd app early Sunday found themselves signed out of their profiles. Entering account information and trying