Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Watching a police-procedural homicide drama, whether it’s the grungiest of VOD potboilers or the most visionary film of the genre, Michael Mann’s silvery, dread-drenched “Manhunter,” we more or less know one thing: At the end of two hours, the grisly mystery we’ve been dunked in will have its catharsis and its resolution. We will know who the killer is, and in knowing that a kind of order will have been restored. David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” with its tantalizing ambiguities, might stand as an exception to the form — a singular winding creep-out, without the closure we’re thirsting for — yet even there you feel, by the end, that you’ve glimpsed the face of evil. But “The Night of the 12th,” the French thriller that was nominated for 10 César Awards and won six of them, including best picture (it opens here on May 19), throws the audience a slow-motion curveball that’s intended to tinker with our dreams. And to a degree, it does. Based on a true-crime book by Pauline Guéna, the movie turns into one of the most casually authentic of investigative murder mysteries. Each time we think we’re seeing a classic suspense arc, it unravels into a dead end, and we think to ourselves: Of course. Crime in real life doesn’t necessarily happen so neatly. “The Night of the 12th” is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I have a little ritual when it comes to animated films. I try to go into them not knowing who the cast members are. That’s not always possible, of course. For the most part, though, I do my best to ignore the publicity and let the voices I hear surprise me — because if you don’t know who the actors are, you respond, I think, in a less biased and more spontaneous way. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” made my crusade easy, since the film has no opening credits. From the earliest moments, I had no idea who was voicing any of the characters. But I did know this: When the villain, a gigantic fire-breathing horned turtle named Bowser, showed up in his studded-leather arm bands, lowered his fire-red eyebrows into a gleaming, gap-toothed grin of the most insidious megalomania and began to push and order people around, all I could think was, “I like this dude.” 

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Disney+ subscribers will be able to jump into the Quantum Realm next month when “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” hits the streaming service. The film, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Jonathan Majors, will come to Disney+ worldwide on May 17. That’s 89 days after “Quantuamania” opened wide in the U.S. on Feb. 17. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” has been one of the worst-reviewed Marvel movies to date. It hauled in $213 million at the domestic box office during its theatrical run and grossed $261.6 million worldwide; the movie had an estimated production budget of $200 million.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Biopics about star athletes or artists tend to have the same broad shape: the rise to achievement and fame, the fall from triumph (often fueled by some combination of addiction and ego), the restoration to a harder-won glory. A great biopic, like “Get On Up” or “I, Tonya,” will tease a profound portrait of the subject out of that form; a middling one will oversimplify the subject just to hit the right beats. But then there’s a film like “Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World.” That’s not a movie title — it’s the title of a parable. And it’s well chosen, since “Big George Foreman” is about a life that feels so outlandishly ready-made for the ups and downs, the lessons and inspirations, of the superstar biopic genre that you don’t even have to mess with it. The real George Foreman has, in effect, already scripted it for you.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In movies, the word “bomb” has always meant two things, generally at the same time. The first and most important definition of bomb is that a movie has lost a disastrous amount of money. Movies, in general, can’t afford to do that — they’re too expensive to produce. Bombs happen, but as a business model they’re not sustainable. A movie that bombs commercially has never been something to write off as a trivial matter. The second definition of bomb, which is linked to the first (though not automatically), is that a film is spectacularly bad. It is, of course, not axiomatic that a movie that bombs commercially has failed as a work of art. There are movies we think of as classics that crashed and burned at the box office — like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Blade Runner” or “Intolerance” or “The Long Goodbye.” It’s become almost trendy to rescue certain films from the scandal of their box-office infamy. The mother of all those rescue jobs is “Heaven’s Gate,” the grandly picturesque 219-minute Marxist art Western that effectively put a stake through the heart of the New Hollywood, helping to take United Artists down along with it — though it’s a film that numerous observers have re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece. I can’t agree on that one; to me, “Heaven’s Gate” remains a visually stately but indulgent wallow. Nevertheless, it’s always worth standing up for the principle that a box-office fiasco isn’t necessarily a bad film.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The romantic action comedy has always had a breathlessly eager-to-please, overstuffed quality. You might say it’s a what’s-not-to-like genre. We laugh! With pulses racing! And swoon at the moonstruck chemistry! In a superior rom-act-com, like “Romancing the Stone” or “Out of Sight” or “True Lies” or the new “Murder Mystery” sequel, the action is the romance — it’s how the characters connect. (One way the form extends vintage Hollywood screwball is that it tends to be about couples who so dislike each other that only by joining in death-defying scrapes can they melt the ice.) But then there are movies like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” where the love gets sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive it’s played for “laughs,” and the too-muchness of the whole thing becomes like one of those fast-food fusion experiments. Sorry, but the movie escapism equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries is not my idea of a good time.  

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Nicholas Hoult confirmed in a recent interview with The Guardian that he lost out on roles in “The Batman,” “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Top Gun: Maverick” all in a row. In a new interview with GQ España, the actor stressed that he is “happy” with his career despite these “disappointments.” Hoult also went into a bit more detail about the experience of losing the title role in “The Batman” to Robert Pattinson. “Of course,” Hoult said when asked if he would’ve liked to play Bruce Wayne/Batman. “I’m sure if you ask most people, they’ll tell you they’d want to portray that role. I think Matt Reeves’ ideas were fantastic and he made a brilliant movie. And I also think that Rob [Robert Pattinson] did an amazing job with the character and I loved seeing him in it. So I don’t think I would have done as good a job as him ultimately. I don’t think I could have fit as well into the world that Matt created as Rob did.”

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Oscar-winning documentarian Bryan Fogel has signed for representation with Range Media Partners. Fogel is best known for his 2018 film “Icarus,” which exposed Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and the whistleblower at its center. The Netflix title won the Academy Award for best documentary, the first such prize for the streamer. Prior to its crowning moment on the Dolby stage, the film sold for $5 million out of the Sundance Film Festival. Additional laurels for “Icarus” included the special jury prize at that year’s Sundance, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Journalism, and nominations from BAFTA, the television academy and the Directors Guild of America.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Let no one deny it: Rupert Murdoch is clever like a fox. He’s slyer than his adversaries in mainstream media. They still think in real-world terms. But Murdoch thinks in terms of the world that he’s created — the world of fake news, of lies that play because they carry the ring of vengeful mythology (life as a Charles Bronson film that never ends). The world that Fox News pretends is reality. You could make a case that in recent weeks, Murdoch’s circus of happy-talk dystopian propaganda (otherwise known as any random half hour of Fox News) took a major hit. The release of documents subpoenaed during the Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News revealed something that was, or should be, profoundly embarrassing to the network: that there are moments when its star huckster, Tucker Carlson, actually tells the truth (at least in private). The revelation that Carlson, along with a number of Fox News executives, peddled Donald Trump’s crackpot assertion that he won the 2020 election not because they believed it, but because they thought they had to go along with what their viewers wanted to hear, made the Fox team look like craven cowards. The lawsuit never made it to trial, but because those documents were leaked you could say the damage was done. And to keep the trial from happening, Murdoch had to cough up the mother of all defamation settlements: $787.5 million. 

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Last month, to my great surprise, I raved about a Guy Ritchie movie, “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre,” as an exhilarating exception to the rule of Ritchie’s style-over-substance, more-frosting-than-cake school of crime-thriller grandiloquence. The film bombed, and more critics than not disagreed with me. But I stand by my assessment of “Operation Fortune” as a diabolically entertaining screwball action-espionage caper. If you want to talk about exceptions to the rule, though, that movie has nothing on the new Guy Ritchie film, which is called (wait for it) “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.” Ritchie’s name was reportedly added to the title because there is already a film in existence called “The Covenant.” But that sounds like an awfully thin reason to suddenly convert Ritchie into a marquee legend, and, in fact, there’s a better reason. Against all odds, he has become one of the best directors working. “The Covenant” isn’t another Ritchie underworld caper. It’s an Afghanistan war drama, and if you’re wondering whether he has made a combat film in some version of the Ritchie style (jazzy violence, fast-break comic-strip dialogue, needle drops), the answer is no. He has put his confectionary flamboyance on hold. “The Covenant” unveils something new: Ritchie the contempo classicist. We’re seeing a born-again filmmaker.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Benita (Julia Mayorga), the young woman at the center of “Rare Objects,” the third feature directed by Katie Holmes, has been through a transformative trauma. In the film’s opening moments, she’s discharged from a mental ward, where she’s been dealing with PTSD; a series of charged flashbacks show us what happened to her. In Manhattan, where she was a university student majoring in economics, she was approached at a bar by a seemingly nice guy, who had a drink with her, and when she went to the restroom he attacked her, shoving her inside and sexually assaulting her. She emerges from this crime a shell of her former self, and Holmes shoots the rape so that we experience how the shock and horror of it could undermine someone’s identity. Benita, out of the hospital, shows up at the home of her doting but quietly stern mother (Saundra Santiago) in Astoria, telling her that she’s taking a break from school; she says nothing at all about what happened to her. She’ll continue to say nothing — to anyone. As she steps back out into the world, hunting for a job, Julia Mayorga acts with a tentative fretful wariness that speaks to the trauma Benita won’t say out loud, and we assume that the movie is going to be about how she confronts that crisis.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If Lars von Trier hadn’t grown top-heavy with the mythology of his self-importance (I’d say that happened around the time of “Antichrist,” in 2009), he might have tossed off a movie like “Sick of Myself” — a social satire in the form of a queasy drama of body horror, and a movie whose disturbing bad-boy tastelessness recalls Von Trier’s “The Idiots,” with a touch of David Cronenberg. This is the second feature by Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director whose first film, “Drib” (2017), was a send-up of the marketing industry, and in a way the new movie is about marketing too. This one, though, takes a viscerally upsetting look at just how far an individual will go to gain attention in the new era of social-media addiction.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sweetwater” is a biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. It’s telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.) There’s a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way the fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. “Sweetwater,” written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie — and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters’ athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. The thunder is hitting HBO Max. “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” is arriving on the streamer, which will soon be renamed to Max, on May 23.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In one of the many jacked-up, bodies-leaping-and-flying, vampire-meets-action-film sequences that punctuate “Renfield,” Dracula (Nicolas Cage), jutting into the movie well before we expect him to, does all the throat-ripping damage he can in a montage that culminates in drapes being thrown open, the sunlight flooding in, and the vampire, in his red bathrobe, bursting into flame. It looks like the climax of many a vampire film, and it leaves Dracula a charred husk. But has he been killed? No way! As Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Dracula’s self-described slave and disciple, explains to us in voice-over, when something like this happens it takes a lot of work to return Dracula to his previous state; it takes many victims for him to feed upon. But with enough blood and enough time, he can claw his way back to his old robust undead form.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There are a lot of reasons why “Air,” the sensational new movie starring Matt Damon and directed by Ben Affleck, is being consumed by audiences with eager pleasure. It’s the rare drama for adults these days that people actually want to see in a movie theater (I don’t mean that to sound negative; the film could jump-start a trend). And that’s no random triumph. “Air,” based on the true story of Nike, Michael Jordan and the man who brought them together, is full of juicy inside talk about money and sports and celebrity and what agents and marketing executives actually do. In that way, it has the qualities that defined both “Jerry Maguire” and “Moneyball.” The script is by Alex Convery, who has come out of nowhere (this is his first produced feature). I would personally like to give a high-five to any screenwriter who creates this kind of dialogue — bright and sharp and nimble, with a cutting worldliness, the kind of conversation that’s been an engine of great films for 100 years. People talking! Spewing what’s on their minds, or deftly concealing it, as we hang on every word. “Air” has come along at just the right moment to remind us that terrific actors delivering savory lines of dialogue is the most special effects that a movie needs.

J. Kim Murphy It’s a box office Koopa d’état. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” continues to super smash its opening projections, drawing $55 million from 4,343 theaters on Friday. Released Wednesday, the film has already earned $137 million in domestic ticket sales. If every dollar were a coin, that would amount to 1.37 million 1-Up mushrooms. That’s a lot of extra lives. The Universal and Illumination film is still on track for a $195 million opening in North America over the five-day Easter weekend frame. That’s way ahead of the $150 million projections that were being reported at the start of the week. Even more impressively, “Super Mario Bros.” now looks to leap to a $368 million global debut. That would become the biggest ever opening for an animated film, though that comes with a huge caveat. The current record holder, 2019’s “Frozen II,” earned $358 million over a traditional three-day window.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. If you missed “Cocaine Bear” in theaters, worry not: the absolutely preposterous slasher comedy about, yes, a coked-up bear, is coming to Peacock on April 14. The Elizabeth Banks-directed film hits the streamer nearly two months after it premiered in theaters, where it beat box office expectations and earned an impressive $24 million during its opening weekend. The wild R-rated movie, inspired by a stranger-than-fiction story about a drug runner’s plane crash, imagines the events that would have transpired if the American black bear that ingested a duffle bag full of blow had lived to tell the tale. It was budgeted at roughly $35 million, which was mostly dedicated to the CGI used to bring to life the coked-out beast alongside the human cast of Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Brooklynn Prince. Its box office success marks another win for Universal following its killer-doll movie “M3GAN,” which collected $170 million globally and, like “Cocaine Bear,” also became available to stream on Peacock only seven weeks after its release.

Brent Lang Executive Editor It’s-a blockbuster! “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” continued to rack up high scores at the box office as it heads into Easter weekend. The animated movie, a collaboration between Illumination, Nintendo and Universal, shows no signs of slowing down, earning a massive $26.5 million on Thursday. That brings its domestic haul to $58.2 million. At this rate, the mustachioed plumber should end his first five days on the big screen with more than $150 million in stateside winnings. Internationally, the movie has earned $62.5 million, pushing global ticket sales to $120.7 million. The week’s other major new release, Amazon Studios’s “Air,” a footwear tale detailing how Nike convinced Michael Jordan to become its most successful brand ambassador, earned $2.4 million on Thursday. That brings the sneaker story’s domestic total to just under $6 million. The film, which stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris Tucker and Viola Davis, is expected to earn $16 million in its first five days in theaters. That’s a mere blip compared to Mario, but a solid result considering the struggles that movies aimed at adults have faced. Affleck directs the film in addition to starring opposite his “Good Will Hunting” buddy Damon. “Air” cost $90 million to make, meaning that Amazon better sell a lot of paper towels to justify that spending.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” launched to the top of box office charts, collecting a mighty $31.7 million on opening day. Ben Affleck’s sports drama “Air,” which also debuted on Wednesday, nabbed $3.2 million from 3,507 venues. After a bigger-than-expected opening day, estimates for Universal and Illumination’s big screen adaptation of the popular “Mario” video game have been revised up to $92 million over the traditional weekend and $141 million in its first five days of release. Those ticket sales continue a strong period at the box office following March releases, “Scream VI,” “Creed III,” “John Wick: Chapter 4” and “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach are poised to clobber the box office competition as “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” readies to power past the $100 million mark in its opening weekend. Universal and Illumination’s big screen adaptation of the popular video game, which opens in 4,000 North American theaters on Wednesday, looks to collect a towering $125 million or more in its first five days of release. It’ll be the second 2023 release, following Disney’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” ($106 million) to open above $100 million. “Mario” will easily lead domestic box office charts over last weekend’s champ, “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” as well as fellow newcomer “Air,” a sports drama directed by Ben Affleck.