Owen Gleiberman: Last News

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Michael B. Jordan’s “Creed III” is now playing in theaters, which means a lot of moviegoers may find themselves asking the same question: Where the hell is Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa? Stallone starred opposite Jordan in “Creed” and “Creed II,” even earning an Oscar nomination for supporting actor thanks to his role in the 2015 first installment. But Stallone is entirely absent from “Creed III.” While Rocky’s name gets name-dropped a couple times in the script, his whereabouts are never explained. Stallone’s absence in “Creed III” marks the first time in nine films and 47 years that a movie in the “Rocky” film franchise does not feature Rocky Balboa. The reason behind Stallone’s departure is twofold: He wasn’t the biggest fan of “Creed III’s” creative direction, and his clash against longtime franchise producer Irwin Winkler remains ongoing.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For 25 years, I have never been much of a Guy Ritchie fan. I found the in-your-face-and-over-the-top crime dramas that made his reputation — “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch,” “Revolver,” and “RocknRolla” — to be empty-flashy exercises in the too-muchness of genre kinetics, overly infatuated with their post-Tarantino cutthroat cool. It was clear that Ritchie had talent, but the way just about every shot in his movies was designed to remind you of that turned the films into layer cakes that were more frosting than cake. After a while, he dropped the badass glitz and settled into a more conventional career, and some of those movies were okay. I confess that I enjoyed his remake of “Swept Away” (yes, the one with Madonna), and he had fun applying what was left of his high-froth ADD style to the Robert Downey Jr. “Sherlock Holmes” franchise. Yet I could never escape the feeling that Guy Ritchie had trapped himself on a hamster wheel of trying too hard. I’ve liked a few of his films. But I’ve never loved one.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, “Children of the Corn” is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear. The original strain of the virus was Stephen King’s short story — published in 1977, at the heart of his shivery heyday. The tale of a group of Nebraska farm-town children who worship a demon that lives in the local cornfields, it was like a slasher version of “Lord of the Flies,” with a touch of the creepiness of “The Wicker Man.” The kids killed the adults around them, but the scariest thing about them is that they’d become a cult. The cornfield demon, known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows, was less a monster than a force, one that spoke to gathering forces in our society — impulses of religious zealotry and intolerance that were starting to take shape by the late ’70s.

Zack Sharf Michael B. Jordan came face to face with one of his high school bullies during a recent “Creed III” premiere event. “The Morning Hustle” radio show host Lore’l revealed on a recent episode of her “Undressing Room” podcast that she attended high school with Jordan and was one of many students who teased the then-aspiring actor for his name. “You know what’s so crazy? I went to school with Michael B. Jordan at a point in life,” Lore’l said on the podcast (via NME). “And to be honest with you, we teased him all the damn time because his name was Michael Jordan. Let’s start there, and he was no Michael Jordan.” “He also would come to school with a headshot,” she added. “We lived in Newark, that’s the hood. We would make fun of him like, ‘What you gonna do with your stupid headshot!?’ And now look at him!”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Adonis Creed, like Rocky Balboa before him, is a fighter who faces down his demons and finds his triumph-of-the-human-spirit mojo, all leading up to his inevitable delivery of that knockout punch (well, okay, Rocky actually lost the fight in “Rocky”). The first two “Creed” films, like the six “Rocky” films, were rah-rah crowd-pleasers, with the hero taking on an adversary who represents the forces of darkness. The boxing foes in these movies are a little like comic-book supervillains: Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Drago’s vengeful son, and so on. They’ve been catchy and, at times, memorable characters, but it’s part of their appeal that they’re two-dimensional raging-bull enemies you would hardly rank as layered human beings.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The last time a movie was marketed with a this-sounds-so-wretchedly-over-the-top-not-to-mention-insane-it-could-almost-be-fun low/high concept, the results, to put it kindly, were mixed. “Snakes on a Plane,” which sounded like a title that Don Simpson scrawled in white powder on a table at 4:00 a.m., was a movie that wore its brain-deadness on both lapels. But 17 years ago, that title inspired mountains of online chatter, to the point that the filmmakers incorporated bits and pieces of the obsessive fan gabble into the movie, most famously the Samuel L. Jackson line, “I have had it with these mothefuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin‘ plane!” The result was that “Snakes on a Plane” felt like the first piece of brazen Hollywood schlock that was crowdsourced. The audience went in thinking: It may be trash, but it’s our trash.   

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “A Man Called Otto,” a heartfelt drama starring Tom Hanks as a cranky widower, has notched an important box office milestone, crossing $100 million globally. The film’s tally stands at $100.4 million, including $61.2 million in North America and $39.2 million internationally. Overseas, the top-selling markets are the United Kingdom ($6.28 million), Australia ($5.17 million), Mexico ($5.06 million), Spain ($2.6 million) and Germany ($2.5 million). In pandemic times, the $100 million benchmark is notable because only a few movies aimed at older audiences, such as Baz Luhrmann’s kaleidoscopic biopic “Elvis,” Tom Cruise’s sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” Brad Pitt’s action-comedy “Bullet Train,” have managed to connect the box office since COVID.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Golda,” Helen Mirren, acting with deft skill and control beneath one of those startling transformative prosthetic makeup jobs, portrays Golda Meir during the three-week cataclysm of the Yom Kippur War, which shook Israel to its bones in the fall of 1973. As the actor stands (or, more often, stoops) before us, we can believe our eyes that this is the Iron Lady of Israel. For here is that frown, those beetle brows, that coarse wavy hair tied into a bun like challah bread, that pugnacious nose, that stare of implacability designed to bore a hole in its beholder. Here, as well, is the woman who lit a thousand cigarettes, chain-smoking her way through the war-room anxiety and through the secret medical treatments she was undergoing at the time for lymphoma.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Quick, what do the following movies have in common? The cheesy middle-aged rom-com “Ticket to Paradise,” the curmudgeon-finds-his-heart-of-gold drama “A Man Called Otto,” and “80 for Brady,” a road comedy about four octogenarians girl-tripping their way to the 2017 Super Bowl. All three are built around those once larger-than-life entities known as movie stars (Julia Roberts and George Clooney in “Paradise”; Tom Hanks in “Otto”; Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Lily Tomlin and Rita Moreno in “Brady”). All three are solid mid-level hits at the domestic box office (“Ticket to Paradise” made $68 million, “A Man Called Otto” has grossed $60 million and “80 for Brady” is chugging its way to the $50 million yard line). That’s a fact that many have taken note of at a time when the most savory offerings of the awards season (“Tár,” “The Fablemans,” “The Banshees of Inisherin”) starkly underperformed at the box office.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. The beautifully creepy android doll from “M3GAN” is shimmying her way into your home. The unrated cut of the satirical sci-fi horror film will begin streaming exclusively on Peacock starting Feb. 24. Directed by Gerard Johnstone and produced by Jason Blum (“Get Out,” “BlacKkKlansman”) and James Wan (“Saw,” “Insidious,” “The Conjuring”), the film stars Alison Williams as Gemma, a brilliant toy company roboticist who creates a lifelike doll programmed with artificial intelligence to be a child’s greatest companion. But things take a tragic turn when Gemma becomes the unprepared caretaker of her newly orphaned niece and brings home the humanoid doll to keep her company.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic No genre of the last few decades can get on my nerves like the indie quirkfest. You know: those movies that keep poking you in the ribs to giggle at their cutely addled characters with their adorable eccentricities — I’m talking woe-is-us hipster comedies like “Pieces of April,” “Lars and the Real Girl” and the pop-crossover “Citizen Kane” of the genre, “Little Miss Sunshine.” The trouble with these movies is that even as they pretend to be lifesize, they’re too conscious about packaging their prefab weirdness; they’re edgy sitcoms minus the laugh tracks. But Rebecca Miller’s “She Came to Me,” which opened the Berlin Film Festival today, demonstrates how the indie quirkfest can be resonant and real, with characters who have soul instead of a chewy center.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Ant-Man,” released eight years ago, was a comic-book movie that almost inadvertently used its hyper-miniaturized cowboy-on-ant-back superhero as a metaphor for what a tiny place the film itself occupied in the MCU. “Ant-Man and the Wasp” (2018) was a bit less small. The director, Peyton Reed, who had a background in human comedy (“Down with Love,” “Bring It On”), expanded the sequel into a puckish fantasy of scale, with characters and objects popping back and forth in size, though the result was still more amusing than momentous. Paul Rudd’s nice-guy divorced dad turned badass metallic bug Scott Lang may have been an official Avenger, but that still didn’t give him more than a flyweight significance.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Magazine Dreams,” a buzzy drama starring Jonathan Majors, landed at Searchlight Pictures following its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Elijah Bynum wrote and directed the movie, about an aspiring bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, who abuses steroids in his quest to become a sports icon. “Magazine Dreams” premiered on Jan. 20 at the Eccles Theater in Park City. The festival wrapped last month, but the film later sparked a bidding war between Neon, Sony Pictures Classics and HBO, according to Deadline, which broke the news of the sale. “We are very proud to bring Elijah’s powerful film to the world,” said Searchlight presidents Matthew Greenfield and David Greenbaum. “Jonathan’s tour-de-force performance, both physically and emotionally, affected us in profound ways.”

One of the surprisingly few movies hitting theaters over the Christmas holiday weekend - Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody - is not finding a warm welcome from critics.The first wave of reviews surfaced on Wednesday morning - just days before the film hits theaters on Friday, garnering just a 41% rating from the first 32 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.While many critics are praising the powerful performance of Naomie Ackie - who fans have bashed for looking nothing like the singer - as the famed singer, they are also bashing the formulaic story that lacks any depth.  Reviews are in: One of the surprisingly few movies hitting theaters over the Christmas holiday weekend - Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody - is not finding a warm welcome from criticsWhile many critics are praising the powerful performance of Naomie Ackie as the famed singer, they are also bashing the formulaic story that lacks any depth.  Critics: While many critics are praising the powerful performance of Naomie Ackie as the famed singer, they are also bashing the formulaic story that lacks any depth. One of the positive reviews is from Variety's Owen Gleiberman, who added this film felt like a different sort of biopic because Houston's struggles with substance abuse and her tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown were always in the public eye, adding, 'Yet as you watch, you may realize how much there is to the story you didn’t know, and how transporting it is. 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody is the kind of lavishly impassioned all-stops-out biopic you either give into or you don’t — and if you do, you may find yourself getting so emotional, baby,' he added.

J. Kim Murphy “Halloween Ends” may be the last we see of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, but the horror series still kills at the box office. Universal’s slasher finale is off to a strong start, projecting a $43.4 million opening from 3,901 theaters. Even with “Halloween Ends” receiving a simultaneous streaming debut on Peacock, the film has managed to draw an impressive figure. It will earn more than enough to top weekend charts, sparking some life into what has largely been a muted season for moviegoing. “Ends” is tracking below last year’s franchise entry, “Halloween Kills,” which earned a $49 million domestic opening with its own day-and-date release. 2018’s “Halloween,” the first entry in this new sequel trilogy to John Carpenter’s landmark 1978 original, released exclusively to theaters, at a time before Peacock was anything more than a developing project at NBCUniversal. The film garnered a staggering $76 million — still the third-highest domestic debut ever for a horror film, after the two “It” entries.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If, like me, you consider “All the President’s Men” to be one of the most exciting movies ever made, it’s remarkable to consider that it came out in 1976, just four years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and downfall had saturated the culture, yet every moment in “All the President’s Men” tingled with discovery. That’s why it’s a film you can watch again and again. When a big-screen journalistic drama gets built around a news story that epic, it needs to give you a version of that feeling. “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s unraveling of the child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn’t as great as “All the President’s Men,” yet it, too, was laced with a sense of discovery. It’s there in how the film anatomized not just the horrific behavior of abusive priests but the omertà of the Church.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The “Halloween” series, which comes to an end this weekend (and if you believe that, I have a set of very rusty kitchen knives I’d like to sell you), has always been the least pretentious of horror franchises. A towering killer in a rubber mask pops out of the shadows to slash one victim after the next. Horror doesn’t get much more basic than that. But, of course, the “Halloween” series has always had a pretentious side too — the side that began with Donald Pleasance droning on about eee-vil, and the side that has extended, over the latest trilogy, to the top-heavy handwringing of Laurie Strode’s self-actualized guilt and despair. As for Michael Myers, who started out as a small-town killer, he has been turned, more and more explicitly, into A Force Larger Than Himself. And in “Halloween Ends,” that trend now culminates in a movie where Michael, in a certain way, is barely in the movie; he’s the film’s totem, its mascot, its looming emblem of evil. “Halloween Ends” doesn’t finish off the franchise by being the most scary or fun entry in the series. (It should have been both, but it’s neither.) Instead, it’s the most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Nuclear,” his intensely compelling, must-see documentary, Oliver Stone makes the vital and historical case that nuclear power has been the victim of a perception/reality conundrum, one that is now in the process of being overturned. The perception is that nuclear power is dangerous: too dangerous to be an essential component of providing our energy needs. The reality, argues Stone, is that nuclear power is clean, abundant, and safe. “Nuclear” says that the ominous reality of our energy crisis — the looming catastrophe of climate change, the hopeful yet stubbornly incremental growth of renewables like wind and solar — is too urgent for nuclear power not to be an essential component of providing our energy needs.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” Elvis Mitchell’s highly pleasurable and eye-opening movie-love documentary about the American Black cinema revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s, Billy Dee Williams, now 85 but still spry, tells a funny story about what it was like to play Louis McKay, the dapper love object and would-be savior of Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues.” The year was 1972, and African-American audiences had rarely (if ever) been given the chance to gawk at a movie star of color who was not just this sexy but this showcased for his sexiness. Louis was like Clark Gable with a dash of Marvin Gaye; when he was on that promenade stairway, Williams says that he just about fell in love with himself. That’s how unprecedented the whole thing was. The actor recalls how the lighting was fussed over (we see a shot in which Louis appears bathed in an old-movie glow), and how unreal that was to him on the set. At the time, Black actors didn’t get lighting like that. But Black audiences drank it in with a better-late-than-never swoon, even as they knew that this was a representation they’d been denied for more than half a century.

J. Kim Murphy There’s one key question gripping the world this weekend: will the box office be smiling, or will it be Lyling? Sony’s “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” had hopes to challenge for the top slot at the box office this weekend, though it seems that the family comedy won’t be able to outpace the second weekend of Paramount’s smash horror film “Smile.” Meanwhile, 20th Century Studios’ “Amsterdam” is bombing in its debut, aiming to finish in third. “Lyle, Lyle” landed a $3.47 million opening day, screening in 4,350 locations. While that’s not exactly the most impressive opening day on paper, the majority of ticket sales for the musical will come with family audiences attending screenings on Saturday, Sunday and the Monday holiday of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which will keep a good fraction of kids out of school.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie format where a character beloved by kids becomes a CGI creature, who is then plugged into a live-action universe, is one of the most casually technically astonishing of all popcorn genres — and, as often as not, one of the most stunted. It almost doesn’t matter if the hero is Garfield or Stuart Little, Alvin and the Chipmunks or Sonic the Hedgehog: The way this genre has descended from the noisy bravura of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the actors tend to be reduced to one-note stooges who get stuck in too many green-screen reaction shots, whereas the critter at the center — the animated star — is, almost inevitably, a preening chatterbox who wears out his welcome by pelting the live-action players, and the audience, with too many bad punchlines.