Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Nearly every mainstream animated feature (and just about every comic-book movie too) sets a tone and visual design that the audience plugs into; the movie, bold and shiny and clever as it may be, won’t deviate much from that. But the images in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” have an intoxicating unpredictability. The film makes you feel like you’re dropping through the floors of a modern art museum on acid, yet there’s a thrilling moment-to-moment logic to it all. The madly eclectic images express something — an eyeball-tickling explosion of quantum physics, or a subliminal nod to some comic-book style from decades ago that’s so retro it’s new, not to mention bedazzling. This feels like it could have been the first movie designed to earn a thumbs up from Andy Warhol and Stephen Hawking.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Most artists, if they’re lucky, invent one thing. But Kenneth Anger, who was a filmmaker, an author, a debauched aristocratic scenester and, to the day of his death at 96 (he reportedly died May 11, though it wasn’t made public until May 24), a figure of puckish mystery, invented several things, each of them epic. In “Fireworks,” his transcendent 14-minute avant-garde film of 1947, Anger invented the very consciousness and imagery of gay liberation — not the desire to be liberated (which was buried in the hearts of gay people everywhere), but the rapturous visual reverie of what that liberation might look like, what it would feel like, why it seemed so forbidden, and why it needed to be. In “Scorpio Rising,” his homoerotic demon-biker/Top-40-orgy blast from the underground, Anger invented MTV, invented what Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets” and David Lynch did in “Blue Velvet,” invented a way to express how music and reality talk to each other.

Marta Balaga Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has scored a Fipresci award in Cannes.  The jury of the International Federation of Film Critics praised the film “for its formal radicality, the complexity of the sound and score, and its contrast between the invisible atrocities behind the wall and a supposed paradise,” Fipresci stated on Saturday.  “By presenting the horror as something usual, and using everyday-like dialogues, it’s a reflection on ignorance as a disease that connects the past with the present.” Glazer’s take on a Nazi family living next door to Auschwitz and enjoying it – loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, who tragically passed away on May 19, just before the premiere – has been getting rave reviews at the French festival, becoming one of the frontrunners for this year’s Palme d’Or.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Jonathan Glazer’s Nazi drama “The Zone of Interest” has sold into major international territories following its buzzy Cannes world premiere. The film centers on the family of a high-ranking SS official that lives next door to Auschwitz concentration camp. The pic has sold into: Austria and Germany (Leonine), Benelux (Cineart), France (BAC), Greece (Spentzos), Italy (I Wonder), Japan (Happinet Phantom Studios), Scandinavia (SF Studios), Spain (Elastica) and Switzerland (Filmcoopi). In Poland — a significant sales market for the film given it is set there — Gutek has come on board as distributor. (A24 was selling worldwide rights for the film, but did not handle the Polish sale.)

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan cockeyed minimalist of Finland, has become the ultimate illustration of the principle that if you make movies in the same mood and style, with the same monosyllabic bombed-out hipster vibe, for a period of 30 years, your movies may not have changed — but the world around them has, so the films will have a totally different effect. In “Fallen Leaves,” the Kaurismäki bauble that’s showing at Cannes this year, there’s actually a scene in which a character uses a computer. The film’s heroine, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), loses her job as a supermarket worker, and to find another gig she rents an HP laptop at a makeshift Internet café that charges 10 Euro for half an hour. Apart from that, the movie unfolds in that scruffy and sparsely decorated so-familiar-it’s-cozy pre-tech Kaurismäki zone, where people still use electric adding machines or listen to a bulky kitchen radio that looks like it’s from the early ’60s. “Fallen Leaves” is set in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, but to our eyes it’s a weirdly underpopulated place where shopping, as a pastime, doesn’t exist, and neither, in any meaningful way, does conversation.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic As much as any filmmaker alive, Wes Anderson has a canon of movies that look and feel all of a piece. The diorama design, which extends from his life-size-dollhouse sets to his graphic lettering; the acting so stylized it’s like postmodern jokey-music-video kabuki; the fable-within-a-fable structure that can seem the cinematic equivalent of nested Russian dolls; the heavy frosting of ironic whimsicality. Most of his movies share these elements, yet the truth is that not all Wes Anderson film are alike. A few, like “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” spin finely wrought tales beneath the filigree. One, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” is an exhilarating caper — as well as (to me) his finest work, ironically because it isn’t pretending to be about anything.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Jessica Hausner, the director of the supremely audacious and disturbing eating-disorder thriller “Club Zero” (yes, I used the words “eating disorder” and “thriller” in the same sentence — that’s the kind of boundary-smashing movie this is), has the potential to be an important filmmaker. Her last movie, “Little Joe” (2019), a sci-fi creep-out about a sinister strain of houseplant, was really a dark-as-midnight parable of the psychotropic-drug era. “Club Zero” won’t be for everyone, but Hausner, channeling some combination of Hitchcock and Cronenberg and “Village of the Damned” and the Todd Haynes of “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” has now made an even more gripping and provocative mind-fuck.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic One of the grand paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, an outlier, a filmmaker who guarded his purity and always looked askance at “the system,” yet because the nature of filmmaking is that it requires a lot of money, and is connected to fame, and produces images that can spread with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; a poet of cinema who made himself a celebrity; an artist who bridged the larger-than-life, old-school ethos of movies with the forbidding imperatives of the avant-garde. All of that contradiction is on full display, with a luscious kind of resonance, in “Godard par Godard,” an hour-long documentary, written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022. The documentary was shown along with Godard’s final film, the 20-minute-long “Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’.” All of which sounds like one of those Cannes–only special events, but au contraire: This is a program that was meant to be seen by the world at large, and with any luck it will be distributed that way. It’s an homage that invites us to look back, with fond fascination, on all the cinema Godard gave us, and on who he really was.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Black Flies,” a movie that keeps working to get high on its own intensity, Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan play paramedics who spend their nights driving through hell (I mean, Brooklyn). There are countless shots of the two in their EMS van, riding along under the tracks of an overhead subway train — the exact kind of grungy Brooklyn boulevard that Popeye Doyle went smashing through in the famous “French Connection” car/subway chase. As Rut (Penn) and Cross (Sheridan) patrol the borough neighborhood of Brownsville, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden sections of New York City, those overheard tracks become part of the film’s meticulously oppressive visual design. The two have so little breathing room they can barely see the sky. After a while, though, you start to think: Don’t these guys everdrive down a side street? Like everything else in “Black Flies,” those subway tracks are stylish signifiers of doom that are a little too in-your-face.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International British writer Martin Amis, the author of the book “The Zone of Interest,” has died at 73. News of his death comes just one day after the big-screen adaptation of his 2014 novel premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews. The New York Times reports that Amis died of esophageal cancer, as confirmed by his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca. Amis published 15 novels over the course of his career, a number of which were adapted. Jonathan Glazer’s treatment of Amis’ chilling Nazi drama “The Zone of Interest” is one of the buzziest premieres to come out of Cannes so far. The film follows the family of a high-ranking SS officer that lives next door to Auschwitz concentration camp. In a review that labelled “Zone of Interest” as “chilling and profound,” Variety critic Owen Gleiberman said the film “holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jonathan Glazer just delivered the first instant sensation of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. “The Zone of Interest,” only the director’s fourth feature film after “Sexy Beast,” “Birth” and “Under the Skin,” earned a six-minute standing ovation following its world premiere. Glazer’s film is austere and challenging as it tells the story of the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, who have created their dream home directly next to the concentration camp. The constant screams of prisoners, gun shots and smoke from the gas chambers haunt their paradise, but their indifference to such horrors creates a terrifying and sinister juxtaposition.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of the thousands of dramatic feature films that deal with the subject of the Holocaust, few have evoked — or have even tried to — the experience of what went on inside the concentration camps. That’s understandable; the horror of that experience is forbidding and in some ways unimaginable. But there’s a small group of movies, like “Schindler’s List” and “Son of Saul” and “The Grey Zone,” that have met that horror head-on, and in an indelible way. To that list we can now add Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality. “The Zone of Interest” isn’t a portrait of the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of the perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is a human monstrousness that’s at once inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting subject is the compartmentalization of evil.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum. It’s the fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” franchise, and though it has its quota of “relentless” action, it rarely tries to match (let alone top) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravura of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” How could it? “Raiders,” whatever one thinks of it as a movie (I always found it a trace impersonal in its ’40s-action-serial-on-steroids excitement), is arguably the most influential blockbuster of the last 45 years, even more so than “Star Wars.” Back in 1977, George Lucas took us through the looking glass of what would become our all-fantasy-all-the-time movie culture. But it was Steven Spielberg, teaming up with Lucas in “Raiders,” who introduced the structural DNA of the one-thing-after-another, action-movie-as-endless-set-piece escapist machine. This means that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” isn’t just coming after four previous “Indiana Jones” films. It’s coming after four decades of high-priced Hollywood action decadence, from the “Fast and Furious” series to the “Mission: Impossible” and “Terminator” and “Lara Croft” and “Transformers” and latter-day “Bond” films (not to mention the Marvel space operas), all of which owe a boundless debt to the aggro zap of the “Raiders” aesthetic.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude (the 1971 IRA prison hunger strike in “Hunger,” the complex horrors of slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the collision of gritty city politics and feminine revolt in “Widows,” the epochal crackdown on West Indian immigrants in London in “Mangrove”) and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

Naman Ramachandran Signature Entertainment has snapped up U.K. and Ireland rights to Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy “You Hurt My Feelings” from FilmNation Entertainment. Directed by Nicole Holofcener, the film stars Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies (“The Crown”) as a couple whose marriage is thrown into turmoil when she overhears his honest reaction to her latest book. The cast also includes Owen Teague, David Cross, Arian Moayed and Michaela Watkins. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will close Sundance London. Reviewing the film for Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman said: “The key to ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ is that the entire movie turns into a satire of what has become our fetishistically supportive and oversensitive therapeutic culture of positivity. All these things, in a way, are necessary. But maybe, the film suggests, we have tried to heal ourselves a little too much. Maybe we need a little more naked honesty mixed in with the wellness.”

J. Kim Murphy The book club can’t topple comic books, as Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” will easily hold off the opening of “Book Club: The Next Chapter” to retain the top spot at the box office. “The Next Chapter” earned $2.14 million on its opening day, projecting a debut of $7 million from 3,508 locations for the three-day frame. That’s on the lower end of estimates heading into the weekend. While there’s hope that the Focus Features release will be able to earn a boost in ticket sales on the Mother’s Day holiday, the sequel won’t be able to match its predecessor. Released by Paramount in 2018, the first “Book Club” debuted to $13.5 million before legging out to a $68 million gross in North America — a solid result for an older-skewing comedy, especially before the COVID pandemic impacted the theatrical landscape.

Ethan Shanfeld Variety garnered a record 96 nominations for the SoCal Journalism awards sponsored by the Los Angeles Press Club, with nods across magazine and entertainment journalism, art and photography, video, audio, online content and social media during the 2022 calendar year. Among the nominations announced Friday were Tim Gray for print journalist of the year and Clayton Davis for online journalist of the year. In addition, Owen Gleiberman, Chris Willman and Daniel D’Addario were nominated as entertainment journalists of the year. “We are extremely proud of our newsroom for a banner year in record-breaking traffic, hard-hitting investigative journalism, profile writing and video. These nominations are a testament to the great work Variety is doing covering the entertainment industry,” said Variety co-editor-in-chiefs Ramin Setoodeh and Cynthia Littleton.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In a movie career that stretches back 25 years, Jennifer Lopez has on occasion done flaked-out underworld thriller romance (“Out of Sight”), capery action (“Parker”) and revenge (“Enough”). Yet she has never placed herself at the center of such a down-and-dirty, grimly overwrought, execute-now-and-ask-questions-later B-movie as “The Mother.” I’m tempted to call the film “minimalist,” because if you consider its bare-bones screenplay (by three writers!), its convoluted utilitarian set-up, its 2D villains, and its essential formulaic momentum, it’s a prime example of action filmmaking made basic. Yet “The Mother” is a Netflix action movie, which means that it has a certain flavor of ambition mixed into its pulp stew. The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad. Lopez, as a military sniper turned broker of underground arms deals turned FBI informant turned savagely cool-headed protector of her 12-year-old daughter, is playing a badass not so far removed from those played by Jason Statham or (in his grade-B prime) Bruce Willis, and she’s up to the task. She shoots, she stabs, she chops windpipes, she motorcycles down stone stairways in one of those chase-through-an-ancient-city action scenes (this one takes place in Havana), she tortures a man by punching him with a fist wrapped in barb wire, she grimaces in muscle-torn agony but mostly looks frozen and implacable. Even more important, she puts her own spin on those familiar motions.

Naman Ramachandran U.K.-based sales and distribution outfit Blue Finch Films has boarded international sales, excluding North America, for William Shatner documentary “You Can Call Me Bill” from Legion M and Exhibit A Pictures. Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, who has previously helmed documentaries such as “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” and “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist,” the film had its world premiere at SXSW 2023 as part of the Documentary Spotlight section. The film is an intimate portrait of William Shatner’s personal journey across nine decades, stripping away all the masks he has worn during his storied career – most famously the Star Trek franchise – to reveal the man behind it all. The first and only feature-length documentary dedicated to Shatner’s life, career and philosophy, it delves into his most fervent passions, hopes and concerns, through a thematic distillation of his most recent autobiographical songs and a deep dive into the farthest reaches of his filmography.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Does chronic Lyme disease exist? That’s the question that haunts “The Quiet Epidemic,” Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s worthy and provocative documentary about the highly controversial syndrome. (The movie premieres on VOD on May 16.) The filmmakers argue, with unflinching advocacy and some very good reporting, that chronic Lyme disease most definitely exists. Among other things, “The Quiet Epidemic” is a portrait of individuals whose lives have been ravaged by it. Yet the movie, in its doggedly opinionated way, does acknowledge the profundity of the debate. The medical establishment, led by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, has long held the position — one it maintains to this day — that Lyme disease is a real thing, eminently curable with a two-to-four week regimen of antibiotics, but that chronic Lyme disease, with sometimes devastating symptoms stretching on for months, years, even decades, is not backed up by the science.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s beyond obvious that women deserve a movie that portrays and celebrates them in their sixties and seventies reveling in the joys of romantic adventure and uninhibited sex. It’s not so obvious that they deserved “Book Club,” the 2018 comedy about four hale, hearty, and prosperous senior friends who read “Fifty Shades of Grey” in their monthly literary white-wine klatsch, only to discover that E.L. James’s S&M princess fantasy jump-starts their hibernating libidos and/or their desire to commit to the men who are courting them. You could use a whole Thesaurus paragraph of withering descriptives to evoke the sort of movie “Book Club” was. It was prefab, it was cookie-cutter, it was paint-by-numbers, it was broad enough to play to the peanut gallery, it was four glorified sitcoms jammed into one overly synthetic package.