News

“Nosferatu” has arrived.

Robert Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent German horror classic “Nosferatu” is being hailed as one of the year’s most terrifying yet visually stunning films. At a special screening Thursday at the Directors Guild of America theater in Los Angeles, Hollywood heavyweights including Chris Pine, Giovanni Ribisi, Casey Affleck and Ruth E. Carter joined an enthusiastic crowd to see Eggers’ haunting vision come to life. Focus Features chairman Peter Kujawski and vice chairman Jason Cassidy also sat through the film to garner the audience’s reactions. Following the screening, Eggers and Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro led a Q&a, diving into Eggers’ fascination with history, his intricate blend of occult theories and folklore, and the captivating performances of stars Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård. Watch the video of the conversation above that was shared with Variety exclusively.

Read: You can see all Academy Award predictions...

Exclusive: Dominic Sessa, the 21-year-old rising star, didn’t win a Supporting Actor BAFTA Award Sunday night — that went to Oppenheimer’s Robert Downey Jr. — but he did pick up his first post-The Holdovers role that will see him starring with Rose Byrne in director Stephanie Laing’s drama Tow.

This news was confirmed by several sources over the BAFTA Awards weekend where your intrepid columnist attended more soirées than is healthy. The trick though is to go teetotal and guzzle down fruit juice: cranberry with a tear-drop of orange juice is the mocktail du jour!

My Deadline colleague, international editor Andreas Wiseman, revealed last week that Byrne is expected to star in the true-story Tow.

Bryne will portray Amanda Ogle, a homeless woman who slept in her 1991 Toyota Camry, who entered into a 369-day legal battle against a towing company that had impounded her car after it had been stolen.

Exclusive: When Downton Abbey first burst on the scene in 2010, the Julian Fellowes-created series quickly drew audiences and made headlines for its unique spin on the traditional British period drama. This was not your grandmother’s upstairs/downstairs look at the upper crust, rather its take on the aristocracy gave contemporary audiences characters and storylines they could relate to with strong women, quotable dialogue and tons of heart.

Now, 12 years later comes Focus Features’ Downton Abbey: A New Era, the feature sequel to the 2019 hit film that notched 238 million in worldwide box office and became the studio’s highest-grossing title ever domestically. But A New Era isn’t just a sequel, it also establishes Focus’ first bona fide franchise — a rare beast in the specialty arena. It’s also a sign of the way the company, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, is thinking about its future.

Directed by...

Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire” is still in the black, but a different distributor has won the project out of the Sundance Film Festival.

With a late-hitting bid, Focus Features is closing in on a deal for worldwide rights to the movie in a sale worth somewhere in the mid-seven-figure range, insiders said. Universal’s prestige label came in nearly a week after A24, the previously reported frontrunner for the film, made an initial offer, sources added. If the deal closes, Focus will distribute the movie domestically, while Universal Pictures International will oversee its foreign roll-out.

July is a native of the Park City festival and one of its quirkiest, most beloved voices. She has numerous awards from the Cannes Film Festival for her notable movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” Her latest, which comes almost 10 years after her last directorial effort “The Future,” stars Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez,...

Leave it to Spike Lee and Lars Von Trier to wake up a festival that lacked fireworks, that is until Monday night’s unusual dueling premieres set festgoers off in all directions.

The big news was Lee’s return to the Palme d’Or competition for the first time in decades (since Jungle Fever in ’91) with about an 8 minute standing ovation after the World Premiere of his BlacKkKlansman in the early slot Monday evening. The Focus Features August 10 release is a rather incredible true story set in the early ’70s when a black detective named Ron Stallworth infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, even becoming phone pals with the notorious David Duke (played nicely by Topher Grace) in order to thwart a suspected attack.

Lee doesn’t hold back and makes it extremely timely with not-so-veiled references to the Trump era, and the rise once again of white supremacism. He really...