Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In Michael Mann’s heady, intricately dark, raptly absorbing “Ferrari,” there’s a quiet scene that takes place the night before the Mille Miglia, the spectacular 1,500-kilometer motorsport endurance race. Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), the Italian sports-car magnate who needs to win the race (the survival of the company that bears his name depends on it), has five drivers who are scheduled to compete. In a kind of calm-before-the-storm ritual, several of them write notes to their romantic partners, telling them how much they love them, just in case they don’t survive the race.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title character of “Comandante,” Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino), is a submarine commander in the Italian Royal Navy who has a different spirit from the military machos we usually encounter in movies. He’s certainly tough enough — a bruiser with a dark edge. “Comandante” is set during the early days of World War II (September and October 1940), and as Salvatore leads the crew of the Cappellini, an iron hulk of an underwater vessel equipped with a dozen torpedoes and a pair of machine guns, he speaks about his dedication to blowing up his enemies.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Retribution,” which could be the title of almost any Liam Neeson film of the past 15 years, the 71-year-old star is still a lean, looming oak tree of a man, but for maybe the first time he’s up against a force that outpowers his sullen machismo. It’s called trying to be a daddy in the 21st century. Neeson’s Matt Turner is a high-powered banker/financier who lives with his wife and two kids in a palatial modernist glass house in Berlin.

Sophia Scorziello editor The first single has been released from the soundtrack of Apple’s musical drama “Flora and Son,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eve Hewson. Titled “High Life,” the single is an emotional yet optimistic track about a motherhood, performed by Hewson and her co-star Orén Kinlan. While she might be the daughter of Irish rockstar Bono, Hewson said she did not enlist her U2 frontman father for help on the project.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s a clockwork ritual of awards season. A movie in contention, one based on a true story, will be dinged for presenting a version of reality that isn’t real enough.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Is comic-book movie culture reaching a tipping point…into peak exhaustion? This summer, we’ve seen signs of that in the ho-hum box-office returns for “The Flash” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” To be fair, the mega-success of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has testified to the genre’s continuing appeal. Still, there are onscreen indicators that the superhero-movie audience, while it remains vast, might be entering the thrill-is-gone zone.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic On July 19, the MPA ratings board handed an NC-17 rating to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’s acclaimed drama about a very unusual love triangle (a man, a woman, and a megalomaniacal romantic sociopath). The film was set to be released just two weeks later; Sachs and his distributor, MUBI, were understandably upset. The scene that triggered the NC-17 rating, as is often the case in situations like this one, was an extended sex scene (the MPA does not like things that are long).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We all know what a MacGuffin is (and in case you don’t, here’s what it is): an object or event that the plot of a thriller hinges on, and which everyone onscreen keeps talking about, yet it has no intrinsic interest apart from how it serves the structure of the movie. The term was mythologized by Hitchcock, and as shorthand for the way a certain kind of movie works it has never gone out of style. But what do you call a MacGuffin that’s so boring the audience can’t pretend to care about it? Let’s call it a MacMuffin.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” has a terrible title, but in theory the film sounds intriguing. It wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, the kind they used to produce back when horror films were actual movies, made with the stodgy well-carpentered rhythm that any movie was made with. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is set in 1897, and for most of it we’re aboard a large wooden ship with multiple sails — the Demeter, a handsome relic, since this is already the era when metal ships were coming in — that’s sailing from Bulgaria to London.

Sophia Scorziello editor Netflix has released the first trailer for the erotic thriller “Fair Play,” which the streamer acquired for $20 million in one of the biggest deals out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor and “Oppenheimer” actor Alden Ehrenreich star in the film, which unravels the complex relationship of a power-hungry couple contending for power at a cutthroat financial firm.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Gran Turismo” is a race-car movie that gives the audience a contact high. That’s what you tend to want from an action drama about souped-up sports cars snaking their way around labyrinthine tracks at 300 kilometers per hour. But there’s an innocence to this one, and a surprise authenticity.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The saga of American movies in the 1970s is now a mythology. In the first half of the decade, the movies that emerged from the New Hollywood were unprecedented in their realism, their immersion in the gritty side pockets of everyday life, their perception of the darkness hidden in the American Dream. Then, of course, came Lucas and Spielberg, who kicked off the blockbuster revolution — the transformation of movies from reality into fantasy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When did the “Mission: Impossible” films become action movies? I’m not sure when that happened, but I do know this much: For a series like the one in question, it’s live by the action, die by the action. For a few days there, people were chattering about all the great action in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” talking up the Fiat car chase or that train-dangling-from-a-cliff climax as if we’d never seen a sequence like that one before.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Ben Kingsley, who likes to go to extremes, has played his share of frowningly overcivilized repressed geeks and also his share of seething walking-id maniacs. But for all of Kingsley’s dexterous light-and-dark range, it’s still rare to see him take on a character as painfully mild as Milton, the small-town codger he plays in “Jules.” Milton, who is 78, lives by himself in a handsome dark-shingled house in Boonton, Penn.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Wes Anderson’s dazzling desert Americana “Asteroid City” will be available to stream on Peacock starting Aug. 11.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie-mad phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” has been a thrilling reminder that audiences can still embrace the movie-theater experience, turning up in awesome droves when they’re offered something new and adventurous. It’s also been powerful evidence that films that aren’t formulaic sequels can succeed in a way that too many recent cookie-cutter franchise films have not. But will all that go down as a lesson for the future? Or a giant anomaly? We probably shouldn‘t kid ourselves.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When the history of movies in the age of streaming, COVID and the first double strike since 1960 is written, the day of July 21, 2023, will still go down as the rare date that’s actually remembered as a box-office landmark. For that was the day that Hollywood dropped two blockbusters — one pink, the other dark — both of which hit their target audiences and went boom. A downside of our franchise culture is that even when movies become impressive hits, their appeal often boils down to a calculus that’s less inspiring than it is a basic expression of mass taste engineered by market forces. Look, the “Jurassic Park” concept worked again. Shocking! The “Mission: Impossible” series has a wild card tucked into its gamesmanship (you’re not going to get AI to do what Tom Cruise does on a motorcycle), but once you look past the star’s stunt mojo, even the perfectly decent new “M:I” installment has been greeted by critics as “the best action film of the summer.” That made me think: Aren’t the “Mission: Impossible” movies supposed to be more than action films? We’ve got “Fast XXV: Fuel-Injected Diesel” for that.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker with a gigantic talent and an even larger mystique. He can be a visionary storyteller — to see that, look no further than “Oppenheimer.” But if you’re a Nolan cultist-believer, the sort of Nolan-is-God devotee who thinks you’re only starting to “get” “The Prestige” when you’ve seen it four times, then his movies, with their spectacular convolutions and plots that loop around themselves, may exist for you in a realm that’s almost beyond story, a kind of rarefied Nolan Land of spellbinding cinematic purity.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In America today, no one has a lock on conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit-hole ideology that defines too many of us. Yet conspiracy theories come in different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are bat-house crazy, some are more than plausible. All, in one way or another, work as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collude in hiding things from us, for the sinister tantalizing truth that we aren’t allowed to see. “They Cloned Tyrone” is a slow-burn inner-city sci-fi nightmare thriller, one that plays off the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived — with justification — within Black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its horrific impact on the hearts and minds of African-Americans is beyond measure. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the war in Vietnam to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the world’s heroin), was dumping drugs into America’s inner cities was a notion that gained currency, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the early scenes of “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum mechanics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan: a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit. But even when “Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten in “Jaws” is one of the most thrilling moments in movie history. After all of Steven Spielberg’s virtuoso framing and cool ’70s Hitchcock scare tactics, the shark’s big-mouthed consumption of a man who fully deserves to be eaten had a shockingly raw “Look, there it is!” exploitation-film brazenness. (One not inaccurate way to describe “Jaws” would be as the greatest B-movie ever made.) “The Flood,” an alligator-attack movie that’s also a violent prison-break thriller, takes its cue from that scene. Set in a backwater Louisiana police station during a hurricane, the film isn’t shy about serving up its big, nasty human-torso-meets-jaws moments. It’s basically a slasher movie with teeth.