Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic From the moment the film was announced a year ago, “Abigail” has been marketed as a remake of “Dracula’s Daughter,” the 1936 Universal Pictures curio. So it’s no spoiler to say that the title character of “Abigail” is…Dracula’s daughter.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What do you call world-building when it’s built entirely out of worlds that have already been built? I wouldn’t call it cinema; it might be closer to Lego with attitude. Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver,” like his “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire,” is a sci-fi action fantasy so familiar and generic, so borrowed from and inspired by other things — it’s the 1977 “Star Wars” meets “Seven Samurai” meets “The Lord of the Guardians of the Rings of the Galaxy” — that it’s already the theme-park version of itself.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A great many people appear to have come out of “Civil War,” Alex Garland’s a-house-divided-against-itself-can-kick-highly-equipped-military-ass dystopian combat thriller, feeling all shook up. They’re disturbed by it, unsettled by it. They experience the movie as if it were holding a violent mirror up to the simmering rage of America’s current political/spiritual/ ideological divide.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Sting,” a giant-spider-grows-in-Brooklyn thriller that’s cheeky, bloody, and (most important) very gooey, Sting is the name given by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a precocious tween, to the elegant two-inch-long black spider that becomes her pet (she keeps it in a jar and feeds it bugs). Yet given how much slaughter is caused by this omnivorous arachnid, which grows bigger and bigger with each feeding, the moniker turns out to be a major understatement.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Back to Black,” the 2006 album that the new Amy Winehouse biopic takes its title from, is a record built on an exquisite contradiction. The music has a crispy delicious retro-bop bounce, a quality that extends to Winehouse’s vocals, which take the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and kick them up into something playfully ferocious. Yet when you tune into the lyrics, they’re as dark as midnight.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The People’s Joker,” a scandalous IP-on-acid coming-out comic-book psychodrama, is a movie that has all the earmarks of an underground/ midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation. Vera Drew, who directed and co-wrote it, plays the title character, a mentally fractured aspiring stand-up comedian who bills herself as Joker the Harlequin.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” is a documentary about 4Chan, the popular imageboard website that became the Petri dish in which QAnon — the mother of all crackpot conspiracy theories — came into being. The story of 4Chan makes for a fascinating chapter in the evolution of Internet culture.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy” is the scariest film I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There had been drill sergeants in movies before Louis Gossett Jr. played one in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 (though for the life of me, I can’t remember any). There would be a lot of them afterwards.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is looking mighty as it heads into its opening weekend, earning an impressive $10 million in Thursday previews. The muscular results come despite the fact that the film suffered meh reviews — critics faulted the latest clash of the primordial beasts for hectic pacing and overstuffed plotting. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, for instance, dismissed the film as “overly busy boilerplate” (though he liked the finale).

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Magnolia Pictures has released a trailer ahead of the May 3 release of “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” about the legendary muse to the Rolling Stones. Scarlett Johansson provides the voice for Pallenberg, based on the words of her unpublished memoir.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Watching “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” I realized that the movie, a standard overly busy and mediocre blockbuster with a pretty awesome wow of a clash-of-the-titans climax, was demonstrating one of the essential principles of Hollywood movie culture today. Namely: All blockbuster movies are now connected! Kong, living in the Hollow Earth, where most of the film is set (the Hollow Earth is a place I’ve never much liked the idea of, since it seems like Earth’s version of a storage basement), is supposedly the last of his kind, but he discovers a child ape who actually looks like an homage to the cuddly creature in the 1967 Japanese film “Son of Godzilla.” This kid gorilla leads Kong to a tribe of scraggly hostile apes who are living in a slave society presided over by the Skar King, an evil ape with blotchy red hair who’s as tall as Kong and wields a skeletal bone whip that looks like it was fashioned out of the spine of a sea serpent.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For more than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween mask, a psycho in a goalie mask, a psycho with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psycho with S&M nails in his face. So why not a psycho Winnie the Pooh? “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” raised a few hackles — otherwise known as free publicity — for having the scuzzy temerity to take a couple of beloved children’s characters and place them at the center of a slasher film. Yet the stunt concept was about all there was to it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sleeping Dogs,” starring Russell Crowe as a retired cop with Alzheimer’s disease, is a half-rusted scrap heap of a detective mystery. It’s patchy, it’s badly lit, it’s glum, it’s overloaded with suspects, and it’s almost proud of its contrivances. Yet in its logy, booby-trapped way, it keeps you watching.

Valerie Wu Intern Disney+ subscribers’ wish has come true, as the Mouse House’s latest animated movie will soon be available to stream. It will begin streaming April 3. “Wish” takes place in the magical kingdom of Rosas, where everyone carries their own “wish” around with them.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic At a glance, Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign for president was the definition of quixotic. She was 47 years old; at the time, she had served only one term (starting in 1968) as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. (Her district centered on the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.) To say that Chisholm wasn’t a seasoned Washington, D.C., player would be putting it mildly, and she looked the part of the outsider.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When two stars have “chemistry,” we tend to think of it as basic animal magnetism. And maybe that’s the essence of it. Yet when a romantic movie works, even a synthetic magical rom-com trifle like “Irish Wish,” what draws us into the chemistry isn’t simply the actors’ sexy connection.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Plastic People” is one of those essential state-of-our-world documentaries. If and when it gets a release (it premiered this week at SXSW), I urge you to see it, to ponder its message, to consider what it’s saying about how microplastics — plastic particles that are less than 5mm in length, though the key ones may be microscopic — have invaded our food, our water, our air, and, quite specifically, our bodies. For decades, it’s been a trope of environmental filmmaking to showcase the ugliness of landfills, and to ask where all the plastic we throw out is ultimately going to go.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Enter the Dragon,” starring Bruce Lee, is one of the four or five greatest action films ever made. Yet it has a thin, awkward, lurching story.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movies, if I dare say it, used to hold us together. They were a shared dream — which is why I wanted to become a film critic, not a poetry critic. The mass mythology of movies felt singular, intoxicating, enveloping, cathartic.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic How distraught is Annette, the severely troubled British mother of two played by Daisy Ridley in “Magpie?” She has gotten a short angular haircut, one that might, in another context, be the height of chic (very Isabella Rossellini). Except that the movie uses it as a symbolic expression of her trauma, like Mia Farrow’s iconic Vidal Sassoon cut in “Rosemary’s Baby.” Annette, who’s on some serious medication, looks at a mirror until it breaks. Does she have telekinetic powers? No, she broke it with her hand (which bleeds into the sink), but the force of her repressed rage is palpable.