Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Brooke Shields came pretty close to starring in Stephen Frears’ 1988 period drama “Dangerous Liaisons” alongside John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and Keanu Reeves. “They told me it came down to me and someone else,” Shields tells me. “They said the other person was this girl not many people knew about. It was Uma Thurman. At that time and that age, it felt so personal, but I’ve learned over time not to take it personally because ‘no’ outweighs ‘yes’ extensively in this business.” Released by Warner Bros., “Dangerous Liaisons” went on to be nominated for seven Oscars, eventually taking home the awards for adapted screenplay, costume design and production design. Christopher Hampton adapted the screenplay from his 1985 play “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” The $14 million film grossed $34.7 million at the box office.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “The Little Mermaid” director Rob Marshall confirmed in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that he met with pop superstar Harry Styles to play the role of Prince Eric opposite Halle Bailey’s Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake. Reports surfaced during the film’s casting process that Styles was being courted to play Prince Eric, but this is the first time Marshall has confirmed that discussions with the Grammy winner took place. Why did Styles turn down Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” remake? According to Marshall, the reason was twofold: He wanted to take on darker films and didn’t want to be in a musical as he made the jump from pop star to actor.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds. Historically, the proverbial problem with live-action movies based on video games — and “Super Mario Bros.,” a leaden dud released 30 years ago, had the dishonor of being the very first one — is that they jam-pack the screen with tropes and fights and characters and landscapes right out of the game, but when it comes to molding all that gimcrackery into, you know, a story, they lose the electronic pulse that made the game addictive. Digital animation is, and always should have been, the true cousin of video games (which are essentially computer fantasies that you control). And “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” takes full advantage of the sculptural liquid zap of the computer-animation medium. Yet it also has a fairy-tale story that’s good enough to get you onto its wavelength.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), the amusingly ironic hero of “Paint” (ironic because, as we discover, he’s about as far from heroic as you can get), hosts a one-man instructional painting show that gets broadcast live out of the PBS station in Burlington, Vermont. Each afternoon, Carl appears on camera for one hour, puffing on his pipe, holding his brushes and palette as he dashes off an oil painting of a local wilderness setting (snowy mountains, twilight vistas, trees), explaining all the while, in the unruffled monotone of a stoned hypnotist, how you too can get to a “special place” just by painting what’s in your heart. Carl himself seems nearly as much of an art object as his canvases of Mt. Mansfield, the Vermont peak he has begun to paint with OCD frequency. He wears the same denim Western shirts, fuzzy beard and ash-blond Afro that he’s been sporting since 1979. He’s a relic: the landscape painter as Fred Rogers for adults, a kind of soft-rock guru from the age when men were Mellow. The biggest TV celebrity in Burlington, he thinks he’s on top of the world, but he’s about to come tumbling down.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Spinning Gold,” a sketchy but adoring if not outright devotional biopic about Neil Bogart, the upstart ’70s music-industry mogul who founded Casablanca Records, there’s a pivotal moment that spins around the story of how Bogart, at a party he was throwing, played the 3-minute-and-20-second single version of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” He played it over and over again because his guests kept asking for it. That’s when the lightbulb went on. Bogart realized that the song needed to be longer, much longer — long enough to have sex to. (It ended up being 16 minutes and 50 seconds.) This is a rather famous anecdote (in the new documentary “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” which just premiered at SXSW, there’s a clip of Bogart telling it on a talk show). So we assume that we’re going to see Bogart meet with Giorgio Moroder, the song’s composer and producer, and change music history.

J. Kim Murphy Hark! “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” looks to reach the top of box office charts in its opening weekend, besting the sophomore outing of “John Wick: Chapter 4.” “Honor Among Thieves” scored $15.3 million in its opening day, a figure that includes $5.6 million from Thursday screenings and specialty previews. Playing in 3,855 venues, the fantasy comedy is projecting a finish around $40 million, which would come in at the higher end of estimates heading into the weekend. That’s a solid figure for “Honor Among Thieves,” which Paramount has thrown support behind with a sweeping press tour and a premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. Along with the studio, Entertainment One (eOne) covered a good fraction of the production budget for the film, which totals about $150 million between the two banners. eOne is a subsidiary of Hasbro, which controls the “Dungeons & Dragons” intellectual property.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Murder Mystery,” a cheeky pasteboard detective thriller-meets-middle-aged-romance that became a huge hit for Netflix four years ago, had the inspiration to team Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston as Nick and Audrey Spitz, a dweeby-sweet New York couple — he was a cop trying, and failing, to get promoted to detective; she was a hairdresser — whose marriage-on-auto-pilot needed a dose of shock therapy. They got it when they went on the European getaway that Nick, a compulsive cheapskate, had been promising Audrey for 15 years. The two wound up on a yacht, at a geezer aristocrat’s party, which turned out to be his death sentence as the moment he cut everyone there out of his will.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Imagine an on-the-road concert documentary shot in the anything-goes days of 1970 — a hurly-burly vérité jamboree like “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” or “Elvis on Tour.” It’s about the biggest rock band in the world. It encompasses 11 shows in 26 days, with headlines and controversies and a film crew out to capture it all. We see the band members backstage, on planes, in their nightly lodgings, and onstage. The crowds are rapturous. “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” is, in a way, that movie. The band that’s on tour, the mighty but fraught Blood, Sweat & Tears, was full of great musicians who most people didn’t know by name. Yet as fronted by the intoxicating huskiness of lead singer David Clayton-Thomas, they emerged from the embers of the counterculture to become one of the first true supergroups. By the time their 1970 tour arrived, Blood, Sweat & Tears were the most popular rock band in America, with a number-one album and a trio of hit singles that remain iconic: “And When I Die,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” and the joyfully bombastic and lurchy ear worm that was “Spinning Wheel.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The headline of this column is doubtlessly unfair. I’m judging a movie before I’ve seen it, before it has even been made. Given the vast volume of junky indifferent product that now slides through the megaplex, and the streaming ocean, on a weekly basis, why not settle in for an ambitious remake of “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s romantically kinky and voluptuous dream thriller of 1958? At least it’s not “Texas Chainsaw XVIII” or another “Minions” movie. At least it will be interesting (right?). Robert Downey Jr., who is in talks to produce and possibly star in a remake of “Vertigo” at Paramount (home of the original film), is a great actor. But once he became a box-office superstar, 15 years ago, with “Iron Man,” he got sucked into the escapist vortex of Marvel and “Sherlock Holmes” and duds like “Dolittle.” Downey, who is about to turn 58, needs to rediscover himself as an actor. Couldn’t he accomplish that by taking on the role of the obsessive detective that James Stewart, who was 49 when he starred in “Vertigo” (but looked 10 years older than Downey), fashioned into one of his own greatest performances?

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The drama of addiction and recovery, as it takes place in the movies, tends to come at us like a series of rituals. There’s the rule-by-rule, day-by-day protocol of 12-step programs (the meetings, the showing up, the sharing, the calls to sponsors); a lot of us may feel we know it well from movies, even if we’ve never personally undergone the experience. There are the deeply engraved patterns of addiction itself: the highs, the lows, the cravings, the exploitation of friends and family members, the descent to the bottom, the grasping for the drink or the pill or the fix (or the one that isn’t there) and, in some cases, the criminal behavior. The reaching out to save oneself is also a kind of ritual — one that some addicts would say God built into us.

Naman Ramachandran New York-based film and TV studio and streaming network FilmRise has acquired North American distribution rights to true-crime documentary feature film “The Thief Collector.” Directed by Emmy winner Allison Otto (“The Love Bugs”), the film follows one of the most audacious and puzzling art thefts of a generation. In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s seminal work, “Woman-Ochre,” was sliced from its frame and stolen off the walls of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, disappearing into the desert. Over 30 years later, in a remote town in New Mexico, the $160 million dollar painting was rediscovered in the unlikeliest of places – the home of an eccentric married couple, both schoolteachers, with a keen eye for great works but a very unconventional method of collecting them. The film features Glenn Howerton co-creator, director, writer and star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Jordan Moreau The “Fury of the Gods” may not be all that furious. Warner Bros. and DC’s “Shazam” sequel is taking flight with $3.4 million at the domestic box office in Thursday previews, behind the original movie’s preview haul in 2019. The sequel to Zachary Levi’s superhero movie will land with a smaller opening than its predecessor. The first “Shazam” movie had $5.9 million in Thursday previews before opening with $53.5 million in April 2019. It went on to gross $140 million domestically and $366 million globally. However, “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” is only expected to bring in $35 million to $40 million. Each of the “Shazam” movies cost $100 million to produce, but that’s a significant drop from the original.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “You Can Call Me Bill” is the latest documentary from director Alexandre O. Philippe, who specializes in plucking tasty subjects out of the pop cosmos and doing deep-dive meditations on them. Philippe often leans into horror (“Memory: The Origins of Alien,” “Doc of the Dead,” and his greatest film, “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene”), but even with other subjects (“The People vs. George Lucas,” “Lynch/Oz”), what he’s always looking for is the heady ineffable curveball insight. So if you go into his new movie, which is all about William Shatner, presuming that it’s going to be something other than a conventional portrait of William Shatner, you’d be quite correct. The movie is built around an interview with the legendary 91-year-old actor, still vigorous and voluble, with a seize-the-day cornball glow to him. In “You Can Call Me Bill,” Shatner sits under the hot lights, with the camera close to his face, talking, talking, and talking — about life, death, acting, fame, love, desolation, and trees.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Why did they give Zachary Levi a haircut for “Shazam! Fury of the Gods”? Four years ago, in the first “Shazam,” Levi played a kid in a superhero’s body, and the movie was smart and witty enough to be a caped version of “Big.” Levi’s look was a major part of it. Shazam, with that cheesy lightning bolt and gold belt and white Italian-restaurant tablecloth of a cape, didn’t resemble other recent comic-book-film heroes; he was more like something out of the ’40s. And Levi sealed the deal was his big popping eyes and ingenuous gee-whiz grin (he was, after all, playing a 14-year-old inside), as well as the hair that topped off his boyish spirit. It was dark and shiny and stood up an inch-and-a-half from his head — a ‘do as superhero stylized, in its way, as the old Superman’s.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Sometimes, when a documentary has a great subject, it can explore that subject with an intimacy that’s arresting, only to treat other aspects of the story with a kind of cavalier casualness. “Love to Love You Donna Summer” is that kind of documentary. Co-directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano (who is Summer’s daughter), it’s full of home movies and photographs and archival footage of Donna Summer, and it creates an eye-opening portrait of the ambitious yet deeply disconsolate woman she was. We see her when she was growing up in Boston, where she sang gospel in church and felt a gift passing through her, knowing that she was going to be famous, or when she moved to Munich in 1968, at 19, to be in the German production of “Hair” (there’s a startling clip of her onstage, in long dark pigtails, singing “Aquarius” in German), or later on, after she’d become a pop star, at home with her daughters, lost in the empty mirror of fame.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the epic culmination of the flamboyantly brutal death-wish-meets-video-game-meets-the-zen-of-Keanu-Reeves action series, our hero finds himself in a Berlin nightclub that resembles a pulsating Bauhaus Eurodisco by way of “Fellini Satyricon.” The place is like a concrete cathedral, with giant mosh pits of dancers throwing their arms up to the heavens as waterfalls cascade down the side walls (it almost looks like it’s raining). But Reeves’ John Wick, as he makes his way through the neon wetness, isn’t dancing. He’s getting ready to start shooting — which, for him, is more or less the same thing. As he skulks forward, oily hair hanging down the sides of his face, the camera glides just ahead of him, framing him like the renegade action demigod he is. We might be in the middle of the world’s most cutting-edge cologne commercial.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Just as the Coca-Cola company, after smudging a perfect product in 1985 with the New Coke, brought that product back and called it Coca-Cola Classic, the 95th Academy Awards telecast made a game attempt to rectify the mishaps of the past few years — the ratings slippage, the pared-down-like-a-skeleton-in-a-train-station 2021 edition, the debacle of The Slap — by bringing back something that we might call Oscar Classic. It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Bottoms,” a high-school comedy that is brazenly gonzo, scaldingly and at times even dementedly over-the-top, and actually about something, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) have been best friends since the first grade, but in their senior year at Rock Ridge High they’re at the end of their tether. They’re losers, they’re lonely, they’re lesbians — and in their eyes, that puts them beneath the bottom of the food chain. So they do what anyone in their position might do. They decide to start a fight club! It’s modeled (sort of) on the one in “Fight Club,” though the movie isn’t particularly interested in that film, where the characters staged bare-knuckle brawls out of a kind of self-serious macho romantic doomsday nihilism. In “Bottoms,” PJ and Josie, in the time-honored tradition of teen-movie protagonists out to lose their virginity, are just looking for a way to sleep with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. They build the club around a scurrilous and rather ridiculous lie: that they’ve both spent time in “juvie.” Sitting around in the gym, with a handful of the “normal” girls they’ve roped into joining the club, all of them share stories about the men they’ve had to fend off (stalkers, pervy stepfathers, you name it). And when they get to the fight-club part, letting out their aggression, the jabs are shockingly violent. We laugh, but we also think: What’s going on here?

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Introducing “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” the lavish hyperkinetic popcorn fairy tale that kicked off SXSW this evening, the film’s co-directors, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, told the audience that they had designed the movie to appeal to hardcore D&D players — and also to those who know absolutely nothing about the game. This came as a relief to me, since what I know about Dungeons & Dragons you could put on the head of a…well, I know so little that I can’t even come up with a proper D&D reference with which to spin that cliché. The filmmakers were being honest. “Honor Among Thieves” is built on the edifice of D&D lore, packed with totems and characters and Easter eggs that fans of the legendary role-playing game will drink in with a connoisseur’s delight. But for those, like me, who have spent their lives avoiding anything to do with Dungeons & Dragons, the film is eminently comprehensible and, in its you’ve-seen-it-before-but-not-quite-this-way fashion, a lot of fun.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter After better-than-expected starts at the domestic and international box office, “Creed III” has already surpassed the $100 million mark globally. Directed by Michael B. Jordan in his feature filmmaking debut, the latest “Creed” movie has collected $58.7 million in North America and $41.8 million overseas to land the biggest opening worldwide in the trilogy. The $75 million-budgeted “Creed III” is the most expensive film in the trilogy (its predecessors cost $35 million and $50 million, respectively), but it already appears to be well-positioned in its theatrical run.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic More often than not, an internationally known freedom fighter will have a personality and temperament as heroic as the actions that made him famous. Just look at Nelson Mandela, Alexei Navalny, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or — as controversial a figure as he remains — Edward Snowden, who for 10 years has conducted himself as a profile in courage. But there are times when the personal and the political don’t sit so easily in the same person. Julian Assange is one of those people. From the moment he launched WikiLeaks, the renegade website that provided an anonymous home for journalists and whistleblowers to spill the secrets and dump the documents of global power, there was an air of absolutism about him, a bombs-away belief in the rightness of his actions that teetered, at times, into anarchistic recklessness. Assange, like Snowden, exposed important revelations about how governments, in particular the government of the United States, operate: the corruptions and cover-ups and collateral damage. Unlike Snowdown, he served up his exposés in an aggressive, indiscriminate way that seemed designed to place himself at the center of the conversation.