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Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I saw “Reptile,” the new Netflix homicide thriller, at home on a link and decided to watch it with subtitles, since this is the sort of moody cop noir about life in the shadows where there’s a lot of murmuring going on. And I didn’t want to miss a clue.

Rudie Obias editor If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. “Gran Turismo” is the latest video game movie from PlayStation Productions and it’s available to stream as a digital purchase on Amazon Prime Video on September 26.

Rudie Obias editor If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” after releasing in theaters in April, is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The wartime thriller is also available to rent for $5.99 or buy for $19.99.

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.

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.

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.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For decades, as I’ve watched Sylvester Stallone on talk shows or caught bits and pieces of promotional interviews with him, my impression, without pondering it much, has been that he’s a dude with a certain charismatic native intelligence. Yet “Sly,” the infectious and fascinating portrait of Stallone and his movies that premiered today at the Toronto Film Festival, is built around an interview with Stallone conducted in his splendid, art-bedecked Mediterranean-style mansion in Beverly Hills (he has since sold it to Adele). And throughout the film, he’s so calmly but blazingly articulate, so candid about the processes of moviemaking and his strengths (and weaknesses) as an actor, so wise about the meaning of his own stardom, that I realized, with a touch of embarrassment, a prejudice I’ve been carrying around for 47 years.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of all the stories and sides of Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper decided to leave out of “Maestro,” the most infamous is surely the “Radical Chic” episode. In 1970, a New York magazine cover story, written by Tom Wolfe and entitled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” spent 20,000 words describing, in delectable you-are-there detail, a party thrown by Lenny and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The first thing to say about Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” is that it’s three-and-a-half hours long. Normally I wouldn’t lead with that daunting fact, especially since the film is mostly marvelous: a documentary that every Paul Simon fan on earth should want to see and experience. But will they? I raise the issue only because “In Restless Dreams” has come into the Toronto Film Festival without a distributor, and let’s just be honest: The 209-minute running time, when you hear about it, doesn’t exactly sound…user-friendly.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Knox Goes Away” is a silky and entrancing thriller directed by its star, Michael Keaton — but as soon as I heard the film’s premise, I’ll admit I was skeptical. Keaton plays an underworld hit man who is diagnosed with dementia. That sounds a bit trendy, and more than that it sounds like a stunt premise.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In 2008, the writer-director Azazel Jacobs made a small but vivid splash with “Momma’s Man,” a Sundance comedy about a troubled dweeb hiding out in the cocoon of his parents’ downtown Manhattan apartment. The parents were played by Jacobs’ own (the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife Flo), and the movie turned their overstuffed bohemian pack-rat museum of a loft into a tiny city of its own. “Momma’s Man” showed extraordinary promise, and in the 15 years since I’ve been waiting for Azazel Jacobs to make good on it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic You know you’re watching a true pop star when that person’s identity — their very existence — smashes boundaries. Elvis Presley was a country boy who mixed country and rockabilly and the blues, and with his sneer and black hair and mascara he looked like no human had ever looked before. Prince was a one-man band who mixed funk and rock with his own synth-pop bitches’ brew and sang, “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” Lil Nas X, following in the footsteps of Elvis’s blue suede shoes and Prince’s James Brown-with-wings delirium, is a Black queer confessional pop hip-hop diva who put himself on the map with a viral single, recorded in about an hour, in which he appropriated the cowboy mystique of the Wild West — and did it with a wink of pure sincerity.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels. With their Porsches and drugs and (by the decade’s end) their idolization of Gordon Gekko, they put the kill into making a killing. They were the new swingers of greed.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Malia Obama, Oscar-winning directors The Daniels and “The Mandalorian” star Pedro Pascal were just a few of the notables who turned up in force for the first Los Angeles screening of A24’s holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” on Tuesday night. The intimate gathering at West Hollywood’s London Hotel was something akin to a bucket of ice water in a social Mojave, as the ongoing Hollywood strikes have shuttered red carpets and made party RSVPs into war room fodder for talent publicists and studio communications executives.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Somewhere, at any given moment, there’s a film director adapting a stage play to the big screen. Yet it’s rare, and fascinating, to see a filmmaker steeped to the gills in cinema as cinema who also has a grand obsession with the theater.

Ellise Shafer Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” received a spirited five-minute standing ovation on Tuesday night, as the director handed out high fives. The action comedy, which stars Glen Powell, received cheers from the beginning, with the crowd clapping throughout the film during various scenes. During the standing ovation, Linklater looked overwhelmed by the applause, mouthing “thank you so much” and holding his hand to his heart.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Is it something in the air? At this year’s Venice Film Festival, the unofficial theme appears to be hit men. David Fincher’s “The Killer” is all about an icy methodical professional executioner. Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance” turns on an act of murder-for-hire.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re looking for an inviolable law of cinema, one that you can more or less can take to the bank, the Venice Film Festival just confirmed an ironically delightful one. It is this: Murder agrees with Woody Allen. We already knew that, of course.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The last time Sofia Coppola made a movie about a teenage royal living in a rococo palace that turned out to be a lavish prison, it was 2006, and the movie, “Marie Antoinette,” was a stylized dream of history — the story of the young queen as naïve and isolated rock star. Coppola’s new movie dramatizes the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley, and the parallels with the earlier film are there if you want to see them.

David Fincher spooked Venice with the world premiere of his latest movie “The Killer,” which stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin. The Netflix drama earned a respectable 5-minute standing ovation at its screening on the Lido on Sunday night. Fassbender and co-star Tilda Swinton couldn’t attend the premiere because of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the bravura opening sequence of David Fincher’s “The Killer,” we watch the title character, a cold-as-dry-ice professional hitman who is never named, as he prepares to assassinate his latest victim. The hit is taking place in Paris, and the target is some sort of powerful corporate tycoon who we, like the killer, know nothing about. His home occupies the entire penthouse floor of one of those ornate block-long Parisian apartment buildings.

Variety’s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote of the film, “When I saw ‘The Palace,’ Roman Polanski’s garish debacle of an ensemble comedy, I was sitting in the Sala Darsena, which seats 1400 (and was full), and on the rare occasion when a line in the movie got laughs, it was literally coming from about six people. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard a giant theater this deadly silent for a movie that’s working this strenuously to amuse you.” Polanski has a history at Venice, having premiered his film “Carnage,” starring Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster, at the festival in 2011, as well as 2019’s “An Officer and a Spy.” His return to the festival this year has been cause for controversy, as he has faced several sexual assault allegations over the course of his career.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic As any critic will tell you, when you’re watching a comedy with an audience, it doesn’t matter how bad the movie is — even the jokes that are making you groan are going to provoke laughter. (That’s why comedies are always screened in advance; the studios want the audience giggles to rub off on you.) But at the Venice Film Festival, when I saw “The Palace,” Roman Polanski’s garish debacle of an ensemble comedy, I was sitting in the Sala Darsena, which seats 1400 (and was full), and on the rare occasion when a line in the movie got laughs, it was literally coming from about six people.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Maestro,” playing the legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper has a light in his eye — a glow of merriment and mischief, of gleeful cosmopolitan desire. His Lenny is a prodigy, a prankster, a seducer, a monk of creative devotion and, through it all, a man of epic contradiction. In public, he tends toward the proper and stentorian; in private, he’s recklessly exuberant enough to give new — or maybe old — meaning to the word gay.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In Michael Mann’s heady, intricately dark, raptly absorbing “Ferrari,” there’s a quiet scene that takes place the night before the Mille Miglia, the spectacular 1,500-kilometer motorsport endurance race. Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), the Italian sports-car magnate who needs to win the race (the survival of the company that bears his name depends on it), has five drivers who are scheduled to compete. In a kind of calm-before-the-storm ritual, several of them write notes to their romantic partners, telling them how much they love them, just in case they don’t survive the race.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title character of “Comandante,” Salvatore Todaro (Pierfrancesco Favino), is a submarine commander in the Italian Royal Navy who has a different spirit from the military machos we usually encounter in movies. He’s certainly tough enough — a bruiser with a dark edge. “Comandante” is set during the early days of World War II (September and October 1940), and as Salvatore leads the crew of the Cappellini, an iron hulk of an underwater vessel equipped with a dozen torpedoes and a pair of machine guns, he speaks about his dedication to blowing up his enemies.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Retribution,” which could be the title of almost any Liam Neeson film of the past 15 years, the 71-year-old star is still a lean, looming oak tree of a man, but for maybe the first time he’s up against a force that outpowers his sullen machismo. It’s called trying to be a daddy in the 21st century. Neeson’s Matt Turner is a high-powered banker/financier who lives with his wife and two kids in a palatial modernist glass house in Berlin.

Sophia Scorziello editor The first single has been released from the soundtrack of Apple’s musical drama “Flora and Son,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eve Hewson. Titled “High Life,” the single is an emotional yet optimistic track about a motherhood, performed by Hewson and her co-star Orén Kinlan. While she might be the daughter of Irish rockstar Bono, Hewson said she did not enlist her U2 frontman father for help on the project.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s a clockwork ritual of awards season. A movie in contention, one based on a true story, will be dinged for presenting a version of reality that isn’t real enough.