Why the New Studio Math — and the New Indie Cred — Won’t Let ‘Beau Is Afraid’ Be a Bomb

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.

EXCLUSIVE: As all of the Cannes packages start to trickle through ahead of the big event on the Croisette next week, an early frontrunner in the hot package game is Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Negga starrer Night Boat to Tangier. Oscar-winning director James Marsh is directing the project, based on the novel of the same name from Kevin Barry’s New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year.

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.

“And Just Like That” some more familiar faces are joining the cast of the “Sex and the City” reboot for season 2.

 some more familiar faces are joining the cast of the  reboot for season 2.Per , showrunner Michael Patrick King has confirmed that Candice Bergen, who played Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker)'s editor, Enid Frick, in SATC and the first of the first of the franchise's films, is officially reprising her role.«Candice Bergen is back as Enid, which we're thrilled about because I always loved Enid,» King told the magazine. «She is a cold, wonderful diva of publishing.»Last viewers saw Enid was in the  movie in 2008.

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.

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.” 

It isn’t just the proximity to New York’s top-shelf production community. It’s also the scale.

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 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.  

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. 

Marta Balaga Keshet International has closed deals with DPG Media (Belgium), TV 2 (Denmark) and TV4 in Finland and Sweden for the hidden camera investigation “Undercover: Sexual Harassment – The Truth,” which debuted on Channel 4 in December. Produced by Kalel Productions, the film sees investigative reporter Ellie Flynn revealing the true extent of sexual harassment towards women of all ages in the U.K. Accompanied by hidden crew members, she goes undercover, enduring countless harassment online and in real-life. “These are stories that women tell one another in their friendship groups or on social media. I wanted to show that feeling,” Flynn tells Variety.

Sufjan Stevens has announced his new album ‘Reflections’ along with new single ‘Ekstasis’.The album is a studio recording of his score for the ballet by choreographer Justin Peck, and was performed by pianists Timo Andres and Conor Hanick. The record is set for release on May 19 via Asthmatic Kitty Records.Speaking about how ‘Ekstasis’ captures the mood of ‘Reflections’, Stevens said: “It is about energy, light and duality.

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 “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.