Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you go to a movie called “The Modelizer,” you tend to assume certain things about your protagonist: that he’ll be a smooth-talking pricelessly well-dressed cad, one who values women too much for certain assets (their looks) and not enough for others (everything else), and that the film will be engineered to give him a comeuppance. All that is true of “The Modelizer.” What you don’t expect is that the movie, in this case, is going to take all that sexist-swinger-as-master-of-the-universe stuff and put it on steroids. “The Modelizer” is set in Hong Kong, which the movie keeps reminding us is the most expensive city in the world. The hero, Shawn Koo (Byron Mann), is the scion of an outrageously wealthy Chinese real-estate family; they own one-third of the property in the city. Shawn, who sees each of his parents once a month and serves as their company’s managing director (basically a show title, since they control everything), lives a life of carefree jet-set hedonism, dating a different fashion model every week.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Halfway through “Insidious: The Red Door,” there’s a moment that encapsulates why the movie isn’t more insidious. Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), the father from the first two “Insidious” films (this one is number five), has just dropped his son off for his freshman year at college. The son, Dalton, is once again played by Ty Simpkins, who was just a spooked kid in the earlier films; now he’s a spooked surly emo art student draped in hippie hair. Eight years ago, Dalton and his father were hypnotized so that they would lose all memory of the Further, the spirit zone Dalton got sucked into as an astral projection of himself. The hypnosis worked; they’ve forgotten the living nightmares they saw. But now the visions are coming back.

McKinley Franklin editor Let’s-a-go: “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is officially making its way to Peacock on Aug. 3, the streamer announced on Thursday. Fans will also get treated to bonus content when the blockbuster animated film arrives on Peacock, including behind-the-scenes interviews with the voice cast, an immersive video field guide and a lucrative “Peaches” lyrical video. Peacock $4.99/Month Buy Now

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sound of Freedom” is being sold as a “conservative” thriller. It’s based on the true story of Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security Special Agent who has devoted himself to fighting child sex trafficking, and who took his crusade private when he founded Operation Underground Railroad, with backing from Glenn Beck. The movie stars Jim Caviezel, who ever since he took on the title role of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” 19 years ago, has been a go-to actor for the kind of faith-based projects that the vast majority of Hollywood stars steer clear of. Wearing a trim dark beard and coppery blond hair, Caviezel plays Ballard as a beatific G.I. Joe meets George C. Scott in “Hardcore” meets an avenging Jesus.

J. Kim Murphy Indiana Jones has begun his last box office crusade, with the fifth franchise entry earning $24 million on its opening day from 4,600 theaters. It’s a figure that includes $7.2 million in previews in Thursday previews. The action-adventure film from Disney and Lucasfilm is expected to debut near the bottom of projections, projecting a three-day opening of $60 million or so. It’ll be more than enough for the Harrison Ford finale to land in the top spot on domestic charts, setting itself up to draw crowds through the Fourth of July holiday — but it’s not exactly the victorious tone-setter for one of the 20 or so most expensive blockbusters ever made. With a whopping $295 million production budget, “Indiana Jones 5” faces quite the trek to theatrical profitability.

William Earl Variety won 13 first-place awards Sunday night at the Los Angeles Press Club’s 65th annual SoCal Journalism Awards, more than twice as many as any other entertainment publication. The lucky 13 awards represented a historic high for Variety at the SoCal Journalism Awards, topping the previous best of 12 first-place prizes the magazine earned in 2018. Variety came into Sunday’s ceremony with a record 96 nominations, representing work published online and in print during the 2022 calendar year. The awards were handed out during a gala dinner attended by hundreds in the historic Crystal Ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Carlos” has one of the best openings I’ve ever seen — or heard — in a music documentary. We hear Carlos Santana, waxing philosophical and wise (as he’s prone to do). Intercut with his words, at throbbing intervals of about 20 seconds (and at top volume), are the iconic organ-and-bass notes — BOM BOM!…BOM BOM! — that open “Oye Como Va,” the 1971 hit by Santana. I’ll confess that “Oye Como Va” is one of those classic-rock radio staples I feel like I’ve heard more times in my life than I ever need to. (Sort of like “Moondance” and “Tempted” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”) Yet “Carlos,” instead of assaulting you with the song, severs those four notes from it (BOM BOM!…BOM BOM!) and blows them up into a piece of pop art, like a Warhol sound painting. It asks us to hear the magic of what Carlos Santana did by reveling in the sonic texture, the Latin-gone-psychedelic moxie of those notes.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives. The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In recent years, as the romantic comedy has done a slow fade-out from the big screen, it often seems to have taken sex right along with it. Maybe that accounts for the extraordinary interest sparked by the trailer for — and media coverage of — “No Hard Feelings,” a sort of romantic comedy about a 32-year-old out-of-work Uber driver, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who gets involved with a gawky 19-year-old virgin geek who’s about to enter Princeton. There’s been some moralistic pearl-clutching over the trailer, though probably for the very same reason that the movie could connect: It looks a little pervy. Yet when you see “No Hard Feelings,” you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Superhero fatigue” is a phrase that tends to make devoted movie lovers swoon with rapture. If you’re someone who cares about movies, who cares about cinema, the very prospect of superhero fatigue inspires you to think: Yes! There’s hope! People will get tired of this shit! But let’s be honest — that’s probably wishful thinking. In the last 20 years, led by Marvel but by no means limited to Marvel, comic book movies have infiltrated our culture and our consciousness to the point that they’re now part of who we are. If you ask any number of people, especially dudes of a certain generation, to name their favorite film, they will look at you and say “Star Wars,” often with a smirk that’s really saying, “’Star Wars,’ of course!” These aren’t just “Star Wars” fans. They’re “Star Wars” fundamentalists, who built the seedbeds of their imaginations on the original trilogy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’ve always been shy when it comes to writing about Wes Anderson, because he’s a filmmaker I rarely connect with. When I watch one of his movies, I can’t help but see his talent (the visual wizardry, the debonair lapidary cleverness), but I feel like I’m experiencing something that was made on a different planet from the one I live on. I have felt that way from his very first feature, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), and I really felt it at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 when I saw “Rushmore” — because everyone there did a backflip of ecstasy, already hailing Anderson as the filmmaker of his generation, and I didn’t get it. I mean, I kind of saw what people were talking about: that “Rushmore” was like “The Graduate” for the new millennium, that the Jason Schwartzman hero had a formidable Holden Caulfield-gone-meta-deadpan attitude that was equal parts devious and desperate, that the Bill Murray character seemed the apotheosis of Bill Murray, and other things. But the bottom line for me is that “Rushmore,” on some essential chemical cinematic level, was too flip, too ironic, too whimsical, too in love with its cheeky postmodern self, and (yes, let’s use the word! How could we not?) too twee.   

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Blackening” is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere. The set-up, which feels like a “Friday the 13th” sequel by way of “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” reunites nine old college chums to celebrate Juneteenth weekend in a big roomy house they’ve rented near the woods. (Yes, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods movie, but “cabin” doesn’t describe this place.) As Tina Turner’s cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” spins on the turntable, the first two to arrive, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), find their way to the basement game room, which has shelves of old board games, an ancient TV set, a Ouija board, and a prominently displayed game called The Blackening. Taking the box cover off, they discover, to their horror, that there’s a plastic Sambo head in the middle of the board, which asks questions like “What’s the first Black character to survive a horror movie?” For a few minutes, we’re in the terrain of “Scream” by way of “Get Out.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.

J. Kim Murphy Robert Gottlieb, an editor extraordinaire who worked with writers as varied as Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro and Bill Clinton, died Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92. Gottlieb’s death was confirmed to the New York Times by his wife, actor Maria Tucci. Working at publishers Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, Gottlieb’s impressive record of shepherding manuscripts into well-regarded, sometimes bestselling and award-winning works earned him a towering reputation among literary elite. John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok and Ray Bradbury were among his clients, along with Katharine Graham, the once publisher of the Washington Post.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bucky F*cking Dent,” the second movie written and directed by David Duchovny (the first was “House of D,” in 2004), is based on a novel by Duchovny that was published in 2016, and whether or not the story is autobiographical, it feels autobiographical, and I mean that as a compliment. Set in the summer of 1978, it’s framed around one man’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox — meaning, of course, the curse of the Bambino, going back to 1918, the last time (until 2004) the Sox won the championship. The man is Ted Fulilove, which is a terrible last name for a movie character, though he’s played by Duchovny as a cussed crab apple with an amusing misanthropic put-down for every occasion (like: “Closure’s for morons”). “Bucky F*cking Dent” has a handful of characters, but it’s essentially a father-son two-hander — one of those dramadies in which the dad is a heartless-on-the-surface coot who was no good when it came to how he treated his family, and the son is a lot nicer and more sensitive, but maybe too sensitive (as a correction to all that paternal dickishness). Which also means that he’s lost.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with the story of Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and early ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Once they’d been unmasked, the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli played out on two levels. The first was the spectacular embarrassing bad joke of it all — though it was never just a joke, since Milli Vanilli’s fans felt a tremendous sense of anger and betrayal at having been fooled. (The joke was on them.) The second level recognized a crucial and obvious truth: that the scandal wasn’t only about Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, with their teenybop dreads and break-lite dance moves, getting up onstage and singing to prerecorded tracks, as if it had all been their idea. No, the brazen fakery of Milli Vanilli echoed, or at least rhymed with, various other kinds of fakery that were embedded in the music industry (the packaging of boy bands, the use of lip-syncing by established stars). This was certainly more extreme, and worthy of being called on the carpet for, but it wasn’t a stand-alone sin.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. After setting a franchise record with a huge $58 million debut at the box office, “Creed 3” is finally available to stream on Prime Video. In the third installment of the sports drama series, directed by Michael B.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In comic-book movies, when it comes to a hero’s superpowers — flying, lifting objects, repelling bullets, the indomitability of a shield or hammer — the audience is almost always on the outside looking in. But in “The Flash,” when the title character throttles forward at the speed of the hot-singe lightning streaks at his back, or floats through the air in slowed-down motion so beyond bullet-time that a mere second appears to last forever, the movie makes us part of the experience. We know just what he’s going through, which is why the scene gives you a jolt.     Early on, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), a forensic chemist in the Central City Police Department, receives a call from Alfred (Jeremy Irons) — yes, that Alfred — letting him know that there’s an attack underway, and that none of the other Justice League members, notably Batman, is around to help. So Barry, in his form-fitting red thermal crystal helmet and suit, zoom-runs all the way to Gotham City, where he confronts a high-rise hospital whose east wing is collapsing, leaving a nursery full of newborns falling through the air. The extended sequence in which he saves them, grabbing energy bites of candy and burrito in between, has the feel of an underwater comedy ballet. It’s life-or-death but cheeky as hell. Just like our cracked hero.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The early “Transformers” films — in fact, just about all the “Transformers” films — were two things at once. They were industrial showroom expos of chop-shop magicianship, with cars and trucks and motorcycles turning themselves inside out, their guts flipping as if a trash compactor had exploded into bits and pieces, only to reassemble themselves into towering robots. The spectacle of those gigantic shape-shifting droids is something that I, more than a lot of critics, always found to be fun. But, of course, the “Transformers” movies were also unrestrained pileups of sheer Michael Bay-ness — kiddie diversion on processed steroids. The plots sprawled all over the place yet somehow never mattered; the films went on way too long; the endless clashing titans made you yearn for the human nuance of a “Godzilla” movie.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

Jordan Moreau What’s up, danger? After nearly five years, it’s time to swing back into the Spider-Verse, as Sony’s sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” has webbed up $17.35 million in Thursday previews at the box office. The animated sequel is expected to open at $80 million this weekend, with some projections going as high as $90 million or more. It’s a big swing ahead of the original movie, 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which opened with $35.4 million and had $3.5 million in Thursday previews. The Thursday total also gives “Across the Spider-Verse” the second-highest preview gross for an animated movie, behind “The Incredibles 2” with $18.5 million, and the second-highest previews for any “Spider-Man” film, behind “Spider-Man: No Way Home” with $50 million.