‘Reptile’ Review: Benicio del Toro in a Grisly Homicide Thriller Where Everyone’s a Suspect

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic One sign of a terrific actor is that he can hold you even when he’s not doing anything. Pierce Brosnan is like that. I wouldn’t call him a minimalist, though he never wastes a word or a movement; he has the precision of an expensive watch.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If there’s a pop musician of the last 60 years who deserves a great documentary, it’s Antonio Carlos Jobim. Some might bristle at my description of him as “pop.” In Brazil, where Jobim, one of the prime architects of bossa nova, is considered a national treasure, he’s simply thought of as a composer, placed on a pedestal along with classical Brazilian composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos. Jobim’s gorgeously complex chord structures — the aural equivalent of melty-colored Impressionist paintings — were arguably more jazz than pop.

Guillermo del Toro has opened up about his Star Wars film that never got made, calling it “good practise” for him and his team.Last month, del Toro confirmed that he was once in line to direct a Star Wars film, though it ultimately never came to fruition. Now, the Pan’s Labyrinth filmmaker has begun speaking more about the axed project, even confirming that it was meant to focus on Jabba The Hutt.Speaking to Collider‘s Steven Weintraub, Guillermo del Toro revealed: “In the last moment, things go away; I’ve had it happen many, many, many times. We had the rise and fall of Jabba the Hutt, so I was super happy.”“We were doing a lot of stuff, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money, and then it’s one of those 30 screenplays that goes away.

It’s been 10 years since the release of Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim.” And thus, it’s been five years since the sequel, ‘Uprising,’ which sadly isn’t directed by del Toro. But it isn’t until now that we find out the real reason why the award-winning filmmaker skipped directing the sequel to what seemed like one of his true passion projects.

Guillermo del Toro is looking back and reflecting on the scrapped Star Wars movie he was developing that would’ve centered around Jabba the Hutt.

Caroline Brew editor Guillermo del Toro revealed he had to drop out of directing the sequel to his 2013 kaiju blockbuster “Pacific Rim” due to scheduling conflicts with “The Shape of Water.” The director walked away from 2018’s “Pacific Rim Uprising” as a result of significant delays caused by a producer’s late payment on Toronto soundstages, Del Toro revealed to Collider in a recent interview. “We were getting ready to do it, it was different from the first, but it had a continuation of many of the things that I was trying to do.

Guillermo del Toro is talking about the Pacific Rim sequel and opening up as to why he didn’t end up directing it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The sequels — or, in two cases, prequels — to “The Exorcist” have all been unqualified turkeys. There is now a movement at hand to declare that John Boorman’s crackpot insect-swarm fantasia “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) was some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, but that’s an act of revisionism every bit as loony tunes as “Heaven’s Gate” revisionism.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Foe” is a grandly muddled dystopian sci-fi movie starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal as a Midwestern farm couple in 2065 (they appear to be the only Midwestern farm couple left). When you hear the film’s premise, which makes it sound like a cross between “Interstellar” and “Blade Runner,” you may think it’s going to be one of those movies in which a pair of critical darlings from the indie world leave their low-budget poetic movies behind to plug themselves into the blockbuster machine.

The engaging and surprising crime film “Reptile” is flying slightly under the radar and perhaps even somewhat underestimated. Maybe it is because it’s a Netflix film, which often falls into—one piece of content of many, for better or worse—maybe it’s because it’s been marketed in a pretty standard straightforward way that makes it look like a prototypical crime or killer procedural (hey, they have to sell these things in the simplest ways they can).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The “Saw” films have always been rightfully tagged as torture porn, but they come on as flesh-ripping morality plays. Each victim, strapped into his or her loopy-ingenious electro-medieval Rube Goldberg slicer-dicer-chopper-gouger, is being put through the agonies of the damned only because of some sin that he or she committed in the real world. The whole concept of sin, articulated this heavily, is more than a little corny (that’s one reason I think the seven-deadly-sins premise of David Fincher’s “Se7en” is that film’s most rickety dimension, rather than its most dramatic), but there’s no denying that in the “Saw” movies the concept serves a canny purpose.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In my opinion, the two greatest directors to emerge from the nexus of international cinema in the 1990s were both Scandinavian. One of them, Lars von Trier, became quite famous, for reasons both good and bad.

Jordan Moreau The “Expendables” crew is undertaking their fourth box office mission, as the aptly named “Expend4bles” opens this weekend. The R-rated movie, starring Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone and more kickass action heroes, made $750,000 in Thursday previews at the box office. The Lionsgate film is expected to open with around $15 million, which would mark the lowest launch of any of the franchise’s entries.

Guillermo del Toro has confirmed that he was once set to helm a Star Wars film that never came to fruition.While little is known of the axed film, del Toro’s Star Wars movie would have featured a script by David S. Goyer, who famously wrote on films such as Man Of Steel, Batman Begins, last year’s The Sandman series on Netflix and more.Goyer revealed the news in a new episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Expend4bles,” the action is more digitally propulsive than it was in “The Expendables” (2010), “The Expendables 2” (2012), or “The Expendables 3” (2014). Yet the preferred mode of killing is reassuringly primitive.

It’s been five years since Stefano Sollima‘s “Sicario: Day Of The Soldado,” the sequel to Denis Villeneuve‘s much-heralded 2015 film. But critics didn’t take to the 2018 sequel like they did to Villeneuve’s original, which suggests the franchise won’t continue.

Well, “Star Wars” fans, the rumors were true. In a new interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, screenwriter David S.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’m a fan of Chris Pine: the early Shatner-smooth charisma, the powerful chops he’s displayed in movies like “Hell or High Water,” the authoritative snap of his performance as the cult-leader heavy in “Don’t Worry Darling.” So I take no vicious pleasure in saying that “Poolman,” a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out. Okay, maybe I’m taking a bit of vicious pleasure in saying that, since I had to sit through the goddamn thing.

This has been a really productive year for Wes Anderson. This summer, we saw the filmmaker release his latest star-studded affair, “Asteroid City,” which got his fans very excited.

EXCLUSIVE: The Outlaws producer Big Talk Studios is developing its first TV thriller, a high-stakes series about a drug-smuggling submarine.