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Exclusive: Joel Courtney and Crystal Reed have signed on to star in Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game for MPI Original Films.

The dramatic comedy produced by MPI is based on the true story of writer and pinball wizard Roger Sharpe, chronicling his journey to overturn New York City’s 35-year ban on pinball.

Austin and Meredith Bragg wrote and directed the film, which heads into production in October.

Stacey Parks, Lana Link, and Rob Pfaltzgraff will produce, with Nick Reid and Roger Sharpe on board as exec producers.

“Joel and Crystal bring so much remarkable talent and warmth to the project,” said The Bragg Brothers. “We’re thrilled to have them on board to bring Roger’s story to the screen.”

Courtney is currently in production on the Netflix film Players, starring alongside Damon Wayans Jr. and Gina Rodriguez. He...

Five top film documentary directors will reveal details behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key 2021 guild and Oscar contenders this month. Each person will participate in two video discussions to be published on Tuesday, January 26, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our contributing editor Charles Bright and a group chat with Charles and all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2021 guild and Oscar contenders:

“Crip Camp” (Netflix): Nicole Newnham, James Lebrecht

Newnham was a News Emmy nominee for “Collisions,” “The Revolutionary Optimists,” “The Rape of Europa” and “Sentenced Home.

Andy Fickman will direct the romantic comedy “Tension Ring,” the debut feature of the newly formed Robbins Lane Entertainment, Variety has learned exclusively.

“Tension Ring” marks the launch of Robbins Lane Entertainment, from Seth B. Fass and Scott Prisand. The shingle is named after the pair’s elementary school in Syosset, Long Island.

Fickman will direct from a script he wrote with Marnie Alexenburg and Kristen Gura Fickman. Inspired by a true love story, “Tension Ring” follows a New York stock broker who enlists the help of his girlfriend’s eccentric father to pull off the engagement of a lifetime — but quickly realizes the alliance could ruin everything.

The project is set to film in New York in early 2019. Fass and Prisand will produce with Fickman’s Oops Doughnuts, with Betsy Sullenger also producing. The film will be executive produced by Robert Leary of Vineyard Point Productions.

“We are thrilled...

Andy Fickman will direct and produce the music-driven romantic comedy “Roomies” with Jenna Dewan via her company, Everheart Productions.

Fickman’s Oops Doughnuts’ Betsy Sullenger and Everheart senior VP Jean Song will also produce.

“Roomies” is based on the 2017 romance novel of the same name by Christina Lauren, about a woman who marries an illegal immigrant in order to keep him in the country and help him get his dream job of starring in a Broadway musical. The story follows the couple as their marriage of convenience evolves from awkward roommates to besotted lovers. Christina Lauren, the combined pen name of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, will adapt their own novel.

Andy Fickman has directed and executive produced CBS’s “Kevin Can Wait” and Netflix’s stand up special “Never Don’t Give Up,” both starring Kevin James. He also helmed James in “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2,” Disney Channel’s “Liv & Maddie,...

“Icarus” took home top honors at the 2018 Academy Awards, winning the trophy for Best Documentary Feature. Director Bryan Fogel accepted the award, along with producer Dan Cogan. This marks the first Oscar win and nomination for Fogel, previously best known as a playwright for the comedy “Jewtopia.” It is also the first win for Cogan, who previously served as executive producer for David France’s Oscar-nominated AIDS documentary “How to Survive a Plague.”

“We dedicate this award to Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, our fearless whistleblower who now lives in grave danger,” Fogel said, accepting the award. “We hope ‘Icarus’ is a wake-up call — yes, about Russia — but more than that, about the importance of telling the truth.”

“Icarus” beat out fellow nominees “Faces Places” (Agnès Varda and Jr), “Last Men in Aleppo” (Feras Fayyad), “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (Steve James), and “Strong Island” (Yance Ford). The film follows Fogel as...

MaryAnn’s quick take… Perfectly illustrative of the serendipitous nature of documentary filmmaking as it pivots from a personal investigation of doping in sports into a thriller with global geopolitical ramifications. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) women’s participation in this film

(learn more about this)

Has there ever been a documentary filmmaker as fortuitous as Bryan Fogel? I don’t mean to denigrate his work by suggesting it was all just dumb luck that resulted in his debut documentary, Icarus, ending up as explosive as it does: he definitely picked a topic with lots of potential for unearthing explosive things. But he cannot possibly have anticipated what would actually happen… and, indeed, the film itself depicts this when we watch him onscreen, dumbfounded, watching news events unfold that not only directly impact the...

The highest-profile documentary in this year’s Oscar race, “Icarus,” was picked up by Netflix at Sundance for $5 million. Netflix marketers adeptly surfed the news cycle to make sure their subscribers as well as Academy voters know that this movie is at the center of the Russian doping scandal.

With the Olympics front and center at the height of Oscar balloting, this movie could well be watched by the most people and squeak past its two main rivals, Cannes prize-winner Agnes Varda’s “Faces Places,” whose co-director Jr was profiled on “60 Minutes” Sunday, and “Last Men in Aleppo,” which has gotten a fresh wind of attention from the Muslim travel ban.

“Icarus” director Bryan Fogel is an unexpected documentarian, to say nothing of an investigative journalist. He started out in Hollywood as a standup comic and actor, but found early success as the creator of a hit Coast Playhouse and Broadway play,...

Actor-turned-documentarian Bryan Fogel literally delivered the print of “Icarus” to Sundance 2017 at 8:00Am; the film premiered at 10:00Am. By the end of the screening, “Icarus” was in the midst of a bidding war that was eventually won by Netflix for $5 million.

Fogel is an unexpected documentarian, to say nothing of an investigative journalist. He started out in Hollywood as a standup comic and actor, but found early success as the creator of a hit Coast Playhouse and Broadway play, “Jewtopia,” which he grew into a touring company, a book, and a movie. He eventually came up with the “Icarus” documentary as his next career move.

As a racing cyclist, Fogel thought he could create a “Super Size Me” movie about doping in sports — injecting himself in the butt with steroids to prove how easy it is to evade detection, as Lance Armstrong did for years. Instead, he stumbled...

Actor-turned-documentarian Bryan Fogel literally delivered the print of “Icarus” to Sundance 2017 at 8:00 am; the film premiered at 10 am. By the end of the screening, “Icarus” was in the midst of a bidding war that was eventually won by Netflix for $5 million.

Fogel is an unexpected documentarian, to say nothing of an investigative journalist. He started out in Hollywood as a standup comic and actor, but found early success as the creator of a hit Coast Playhouse and Broadway play, “Jewtopia,” which he grew into a touring company, a book, and a movie. He eventually came up with the “Icarus” documentary as his next career move.

As a racing cyclist, Fogel thought he could create a “Super Size Me” movie about doping in sports — injecting himself in the butt with steroids to prove how easy it is to evade detection, as Lance Armstrong did for years. Instead, he stumbled onto...

Bryan Fogel stumbles upon state-sponsored doping in a sometimes clunky, but unquestionably revelatory documentary

Few filmmakers have stumbled upon documentary gold in quite as fortuitous a fashion as Bryan Fogel, the man behind this revelatory account of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. Primarily a playwright (he wrote an off-Broadway comedy called Jewtopia), Fogel is also a keen amateur cyclist and, in the wake of the Lance Armstrong scandal, set out to prove just how easy it was to evade cycling’s creaking testing system by competing chemically enhanced in the same prestigious amateur race that he had struggled in the year before. The plan was to boost his best time, pass with flying colours through the urine tests required of all competitors and broadcast the results in muckraking documentary form.

Related: Icarus film finds more than Greek tragedy in Russia doping scandal | Sean Ingle...

Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy. An actor and playwright best known for the comedy Jewtopia, Fogel is trying his hand at feature-length non-fiction filmmaking for the first time with Icarus, and he just happened to stumble onto the kind of relevant, ripped-from-the-headlines scandal that investigative journalists spend years trying to dig up. What starts out as a Super Size Me-esque stunt—with Fogel injecting himself with performance-enhancing drugs to compete in an amateur cycling race—becomes a wider-ranging exposé of doping in organized sports. And then it takes a darker but in retrospect inevitable turn, as the filmmaker’s foray into the shady world of PEDs brings him into contact with a network of Russian scientists who’d rather not get caught on camera.

There is at least one...

“Icarus” starts out as one kind of movie, and then becomes a much better one. At first, director Bryan Fogel seems intent on making the sporting world’s answer to “Super Size Me,” by subjecting himself to performance-enhancing drugs to see if he can avoid detection. But then he stumbles into shocking revelations about Russia’s massive doping conspiracy and the scenario gets dark, gripping, and altogether more important.

The jarring shift doesn’t quite rescue the movie from uneven storytelling and murky research, but “Icarus” undoubtedly succeeds at emphasizing the shocking nature of Russia’s cover-up — and the dangerous reverberations it has for a key whistleblower.

That would be Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the antidoping laboratory chief who eventually fled to the United States and leaked information about Russia’s tactics for burying its athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs to a group of New York Times reporters in early 2016. Fogel...

Playing like a gonzo Laura Poitras film, Jewtopia star and co-writer Bryan Fogel's first documentary pulls back the curtain on the man who was both the facilitator and whistle-blower of Russia's massive sports doping program. Having the good doctor front-and-center to reveal how he pulled off the staggering deception (just as two of his former colleagues happened to die “unexpectedly”) is the kind of major “get” that occasionally transforms a documentary into an event. But while Icarus technically doesn't break any news, it certainly scores many points by showing a diabolical wizard so surprisingly laying his secrets on...

Bidding wars have already begun for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Buyers snapped up six titles in the days leading up to the fest, including one that A24 purchased sight unseen: David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. Other movies acquired in the past two weeks are “Berlin Syndrome” (Netflix), “Call Me By Your Name” (Sony Pictures Classics), “Casting JonBenet” (Netflix), “Cries From Syria” (HBO for television rights) and “Long Strange Trip” (Amazon).

Read More: Sundance 2017: Netflix, Vertical Acquire ‘Berlin Syndrome’

With 120 features playing at Sundance, there are plenty of hot titles remaining for acquisition executive, though it will be tough for any film to exceed last year’s $17.5 million purchase of “The Birth of a Nation” by Fox Searchlight, the biggest deal in the festival’s history.

Which movies are likely to have buyers lining up in the cold this year? Here are 14 hot...

A repulsive and disgustingly manipulative roundrobin of revenge that veers from softcore porn to an emotionally ignorant parody of a family drama. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

Dawn Patrol is not the action adventure thrill ride about surfers that it would like you to believe it is. It has nothing to do with either the 1930 or 1938 films of (nearly) the same name about World War I fighter pilots. But it does hope that you will grant its central character some of the automatic sympathy that comes with a soldier’s uniform, because that’s how it introduces us to the “plight” of John (Scott Eastwood: Fury). He is in a desert somewhere — we are clearly meant to infer that it’s Iraq or Afghanistan — wearing Marine fatigues and being held captive by a woman...

For almost the entire running time of this movie, we have no idea what it is about. What is it trying to say? What sort of story is it trying to tell? I’m “biast” (pro): love Rosamund Pike

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

In my head I’m calling this film What Is This I Can’t Even: The Movie. It works at least as well as the blandly generic and not even really apropos Return to Sender, which describes a tiny section of the second act that then resolves itself and has no further bearing on the story. In fact, the bearing it does have on the story hardly makes any sense at all, not on the level of plot, character, or theme. Not that the plot, characters, or putative themes make any sense on a whole-movie level,...

If you’ve never heard of the play that inspired the film, no one could blame you for having a little bit of apprehension heading into a film called Jewtopia. The film’s name alone makes you wonder if it’s going to be an incredibly offensive onslaught of anti-semitic one-liners or a comedy created by and knowingly winking at anyone who’s ever lived or observed Jewish life in America. It’s a comedy staple that’s become increasingly common over the years, with the guilt-tripping mothers, a mandatory career path of lawyer, doctor, or media mogul, and many other overly familiar stereotypes. Jewtopia plays them all up, but in a way that’s simultaneously repetitive and fresh. It doesn’t hurt that it’s one of the best performances for Joel David Moore or Ivan Sergei, or that they’re backed by Tom Arnold, Jon Lovitz, Jennifer Love Hewitt,...

The longlist for the Best Song category in the Oscars has been announced – so what should make the cut?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the longlist of songs for its Best Original Song Oscar in 2014, ahead of the nominations for the shortlist on January 14.

The list features 75 songs written for movies over the last year, with artists including Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, U2, Coldplay, Kings Of Leon, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and M83 all making the grade. Pharrell is included for his hit Happy, currently in the top 5 of the UK charts, which appears in Despicable Me 2, and other animated films make up a large proportion of those selected: Epic, Turbo, The Croods, Planes, Escape From Planet Earth and Monsters University all also get a mention.

The Great Gatsby, with its bold and incongruous soundtrack of modern musicians, gets five mentions for songs by Jay Z,...

One gets flummoxed when forced to discuss something like “Jewtopia,” the existence of which we’d all like to disavow. Based on the sort of off-Broadway play best suited to people who hate theater, this embarrassing cocktail of racial obliviousness nonetheless has amassed a considerable cast of established names to sully themselves for the sake of gags that would be booed out of the writer’s room for a Chuck Lorre sitcom. So it’s got that going for it: if you like moderately big names regardless of the context, then “Jewtopia” merits a hearty recommendation. The thoroughly unlikable Ivan Sergei is Christian, a dim-witted son of an army dad (Peter Stormare, inexplicably continuing to play American southerners) who harbors a fetish for Jewish girls. His reasoning, that he wants the theoretically-controlling shishka bride to control and adjust every part of his life, is maybe the least offensive racial stereotype that peppers his stew.

In Brian Fogel's new romantic comedy Jewtopia, mixed signals are the order of the day, both from the characters to each other and from the movie to the audience. When redneck plumber Christian O'Connell (Ivan Sergei) finally gets Alison Marks's (Jennifer Love Hewitt) phone number, he hopes it will end the nine years he's spent mourning the Jewish college girlfriend who broke up with him because of his religion. Alison, the rabbi's daughter, loves Christian's Nascar jacket, which she mistakes for an indication of his sense of humor. In fact, Christian just likes Nascar. He also likes Jewish women. What should make viewers skeptical, besides Christian's fetish for Semites, is that despite living in Los Angeles, he appears only to know one actual Jew—his childhood best friend...

After record-breaking off-Broadway, Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida, and Toronto runs, Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, the creators and stars of Jewtopia, finally make their Philadelphia debut with World of Jewtopia. The hilarious and irreverent duo performs at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater beginning Thursday, December 24 – 27 before heading back to Broadway in the fall 2010. Tickets for World of Jewtopia are now on sale.