Owen Gleiberman Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

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.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Is comic-book movie culture reaching a tipping point…into peak exhaustion? This summer, we’ve seen signs of that in the ho-hum box-office returns for “The Flash” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” To be fair, the mega-success of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” has testified to the genre’s continuing appeal. Still, there are onscreen indicators that the superhero-movie audience, while it remains vast, might be entering the thrill-is-gone zone.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic On July 19, the MPA ratings board handed an NC-17 rating to “Passages,” Ira Sachs’s acclaimed drama about a very unusual love triangle (a man, a woman, and a megalomaniacal romantic sociopath). The film was set to be released just two weeks later; Sachs and his distributor, MUBI, were understandably upset. The scene that triggered the NC-17 rating, as is often the case in situations like this one, was an extended sex scene (the MPA does not like things that are long).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We all know what a MacGuffin is (and in case you don’t, here’s what it is): an object or event that the plot of a thriller hinges on, and which everyone onscreen keeps talking about, yet it has no intrinsic interest apart from how it serves the structure of the movie. The term was mythologized by Hitchcock, and as shorthand for the way a certain kind of movie works it has never gone out of style. But what do you call a MacGuffin that’s so boring the audience can’t pretend to care about it? Let’s call it a MacMuffin.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” has a terrible title, but in theory the film sounds intriguing. It wants to be an old-fashioned monster movie, the kind they used to produce back when horror films were actual movies, made with the stodgy well-carpentered rhythm that any movie was made with. “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” is set in 1897, and for most of it we’re aboard a large wooden ship with multiple sails — the Demeter, a handsome relic, since this is already the era when metal ships were coming in — that’s sailing from Bulgaria to London.

Sophia Scorziello editor Netflix has released the first trailer for the erotic thriller “Fair Play,” which the streamer acquired for $20 million in one of the biggest deals out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor and “Oppenheimer” actor Alden Ehrenreich star in the film, which unravels the complex relationship of a power-hungry couple contending for power at a cutthroat financial firm.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Gran Turismo” is a race-car movie that gives the audience a contact high. That’s what you tend to want from an action drama about souped-up sports cars snaking their way around labyrinthine tracks at 300 kilometers per hour. But there’s an innocence to this one, and a surprise authenticity.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The saga of American movies in the 1970s is now a mythology. In the first half of the decade, the movies that emerged from the New Hollywood were unprecedented in their realism, their immersion in the gritty side pockets of everyday life, their perception of the darkness hidden in the American Dream. Then, of course, came Lucas and Spielberg, who kicked off the blockbuster revolution — the transformation of movies from reality into fantasy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When did the “Mission: Impossible” films become action movies? I’m not sure when that happened, but I do know this much: For a series like the one in question, it’s live by the action, die by the action. For a few days there, people were chattering about all the great action in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” talking up the Fiat car chase or that train-dangling-from-a-cliff climax as if we’d never seen a sequence like that one before.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Ben Kingsley, who likes to go to extremes, has played his share of frowningly overcivilized repressed geeks and also his share of seething walking-id maniacs. But for all of Kingsley’s dexterous light-and-dark range, it’s still rare to see him take on a character as painfully mild as Milton, the small-town codger he plays in “Jules.” Milton, who is 78, lives by himself in a handsome dark-shingled house in Boonton, Penn.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Wes Anderson’s dazzling desert Americana “Asteroid City” will be available to stream on Peacock starting Aug. 11.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The movie-mad phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” has been a thrilling reminder that audiences can still embrace the movie-theater experience, turning up in awesome droves when they’re offered something new and adventurous. It’s also been powerful evidence that films that aren’t formulaic sequels can succeed in a way that too many recent cookie-cutter franchise films have not. But will all that go down as a lesson for the future? Or a giant anomaly? We probably shouldn‘t kid ourselves.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When the history of movies in the age of streaming, COVID and the first double strike since 1960 is written, the day of July 21, 2023, will still go down as the rare date that’s actually remembered as a box-office landmark. For that was the day that Hollywood dropped two blockbusters — one pink, the other dark — both of which hit their target audiences and went boom. A downside of our franchise culture is that even when movies become impressive hits, their appeal often boils down to a calculus that’s less inspiring than it is a basic expression of mass taste engineered by market forces. Look, the “Jurassic Park” concept worked again. Shocking! The “Mission: Impossible” series has a wild card tucked into its gamesmanship (you’re not going to get AI to do what Tom Cruise does on a motorcycle), but once you look past the star’s stunt mojo, even the perfectly decent new “M:I” installment has been greeted by critics as “the best action film of the summer.” That made me think: Aren’t the “Mission: Impossible” movies supposed to be more than action films? We’ve got “Fast XXV: Fuel-Injected Diesel” for that.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker with a gigantic talent and an even larger mystique. He can be a visionary storyteller — to see that, look no further than “Oppenheimer.” But if you’re a Nolan cultist-believer, the sort of Nolan-is-God devotee who thinks you’re only starting to “get” “The Prestige” when you’ve seen it four times, then his movies, with their spectacular convolutions and plots that loop around themselves, may exist for you in a realm that’s almost beyond story, a kind of rarefied Nolan Land of spellbinding cinematic purity.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In America today, no one has a lock on conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit-hole ideology that defines too many of us. Yet conspiracy theories come in different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are bat-house crazy, some are more than plausible. All, in one way or another, work as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collude in hiding things from us, for the sinister tantalizing truth that we aren’t allowed to see. “They Cloned Tyrone” is a slow-burn inner-city sci-fi nightmare thriller, one that plays off the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived — with justification — within Black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its horrific impact on the hearts and minds of African-Americans is beyond measure. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the war in Vietnam to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the world’s heroin), was dumping drugs into America’s inner cities was a notion that gained currency, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the early scenes of “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum mechanics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan: a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit. But even when “Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten in “Jaws” is one of the most thrilling moments in movie history. After all of Steven Spielberg’s virtuoso framing and cool ’70s Hitchcock scare tactics, the shark’s big-mouthed consumption of a man who fully deserves to be eaten had a shockingly raw “Look, there it is!” exploitation-film brazenness. (One not inaccurate way to describe “Jaws” would be as the greatest B-movie ever made.) “The Flood,” an alligator-attack movie that’s also a violent prison-break thriller, takes its cue from that scene. Set in a backwater Louisiana police station during a hurricane, the film isn’t shy about serving up its big, nasty human-torso-meets-jaws moments. It’s basically a slasher movie with teeth.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you go to a movie called “The Modelizer,” you tend to assume certain things about your protagonist: that he’ll be a smooth-talking pricelessly well-dressed cad, one who values women too much for certain assets (their looks) and not enough for others (everything else), and that the film will be engineered to give him a comeuppance. All that is true of “The Modelizer.” What you don’t expect is that the movie, in this case, is going to take all that sexist-swinger-as-master-of-the-universe stuff and put it on steroids. “The Modelizer” is set in Hong Kong, which the movie keeps reminding us is the most expensive city in the world. The hero, Shawn Koo (Byron Mann), is the scion of an outrageously wealthy Chinese real-estate family; they own one-third of the property in the city. Shawn, who sees each of his parents once a month and serves as their company’s managing director (basically a show title, since they control everything), lives a life of carefree jet-set hedonism, dating a different fashion model every week.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Halfway through “Insidious: The Red Door,” there’s a moment that encapsulates why the movie isn’t more insidious. Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), the father from the first two “Insidious” films (this one is number five), has just dropped his son off for his freshman year at college. The son, Dalton, is once again played by Ty Simpkins, who was just a spooked kid in the earlier films; now he’s a spooked surly emo art student draped in hippie hair. Eight years ago, Dalton and his father were hypnotized so that they would lose all memory of the Further, the spirit zone Dalton got sucked into as an astral projection of himself. The hypnosis worked; they’ve forgotten the living nightmares they saw. But now the visions are coming back.

McKinley Franklin editor Let’s-a-go: “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is officially making its way to Peacock on Aug. 3, the streamer announced on Thursday. Fans will also get treated to bonus content when the blockbuster animated film arrives on Peacock, including behind-the-scenes interviews with the voice cast, an immersive video field guide and a lucrative “Peaches” lyrical video. Peacock $4.99/Month Buy Now

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sound of Freedom” is being sold as a “conservative” thriller. It’s based on the true story of Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security Special Agent who has devoted himself to fighting child sex trafficking, and who took his crusade private when he founded Operation Underground Railroad, with backing from Glenn Beck. The movie stars Jim Caviezel, who ever since he took on the title role of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” 19 years ago, has been a go-to actor for the kind of faith-based projects that the vast majority of Hollywood stars steer clear of. Wearing a trim dark beard and coppery blond hair, Caviezel plays Ballard as a beatific G.I. Joe meets George C. Scott in “Hardcore” meets an avenging Jesus.

J. Kim Murphy Indiana Jones has begun his last box office crusade, with the fifth franchise entry earning $24 million on its opening day from 4,600 theaters. It’s a figure that includes $7.2 million in previews in Thursday previews. The action-adventure film from Disney and Lucasfilm is expected to debut near the bottom of projections, projecting a three-day opening of $60 million or so. It’ll be more than enough for the Harrison Ford finale to land in the top spot on domestic charts, setting itself up to draw crowds through the Fourth of July holiday — but it’s not exactly the victorious tone-setter for one of the 20 or so most expensive blockbusters ever made. With a whopping $295 million production budget, “Indiana Jones 5” faces quite the trek to theatrical profitability.

William Earl Variety won 13 first-place awards Sunday night at the Los Angeles Press Club’s 65th annual SoCal Journalism Awards, more than twice as many as any other entertainment publication. The lucky 13 awards represented a historic high for Variety at the SoCal Journalism Awards, topping the previous best of 12 first-place prizes the magazine earned in 2018. Variety came into Sunday’s ceremony with a record 96 nominations, representing work published online and in print during the 2022 calendar year. The awards were handed out during a gala dinner attended by hundreds in the historic Crystal Ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Carlos” has one of the best openings I’ve ever seen — or heard — in a music documentary. We hear Carlos Santana, waxing philosophical and wise (as he’s prone to do). Intercut with his words, at throbbing intervals of about 20 seconds (and at top volume), are the iconic organ-and-bass notes — BOM BOM!…BOM BOM! — that open “Oye Como Va,” the 1971 hit by Santana. I’ll confess that “Oye Como Va” is one of those classic-rock radio staples I feel like I’ve heard more times in my life than I ever need to. (Sort of like “Moondance” and “Tempted” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”) Yet “Carlos,” instead of assaulting you with the song, severs those four notes from it (BOM BOM!…BOM BOM!) and blows them up into a piece of pop art, like a Warhol sound painting. It asks us to hear the magic of what Carlos Santana did by reveling in the sonic texture, the Latin-gone-psychedelic moxie of those notes.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives. The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In recent years, as the romantic comedy has done a slow fade-out from the big screen, it often seems to have taken sex right along with it. Maybe that accounts for the extraordinary interest sparked by the trailer for — and media coverage of — “No Hard Feelings,” a sort of romantic comedy about a 32-year-old out-of-work Uber driver, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who gets involved with a gawky 19-year-old virgin geek who’s about to enter Princeton. There’s been some moralistic pearl-clutching over the trailer, though probably for the very same reason that the movie could connect: It looks a little pervy. Yet when you see “No Hard Feelings,” you realize that the film’s promise of risky business is little more than a big tease.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Superhero fatigue” is a phrase that tends to make devoted movie lovers swoon with rapture. If you’re someone who cares about movies, who cares about cinema, the very prospect of superhero fatigue inspires you to think: Yes! There’s hope! People will get tired of this shit! But let’s be honest — that’s probably wishful thinking. In the last 20 years, led by Marvel but by no means limited to Marvel, comic book movies have infiltrated our culture and our consciousness to the point that they’re now part of who we are. If you ask any number of people, especially dudes of a certain generation, to name their favorite film, they will look at you and say “Star Wars,” often with a smirk that’s really saying, “’Star Wars,’ of course!” These aren’t just “Star Wars” fans. They’re “Star Wars” fundamentalists, who built the seedbeds of their imaginations on the original trilogy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’ve always been shy when it comes to writing about Wes Anderson, because he’s a filmmaker I rarely connect with. When I watch one of his movies, I can’t help but see his talent (the visual wizardry, the debonair lapidary cleverness), but I feel like I’m experiencing something that was made on a different planet from the one I live on. I have felt that way from his very first feature, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), and I really felt it at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 when I saw “Rushmore” — because everyone there did a backflip of ecstasy, already hailing Anderson as the filmmaker of his generation, and I didn’t get it. I mean, I kind of saw what people were talking about: that “Rushmore” was like “The Graduate” for the new millennium, that the Jason Schwartzman hero had a formidable Holden Caulfield-gone-meta-deadpan attitude that was equal parts devious and desperate, that the Bill Murray character seemed the apotheosis of Bill Murray, and other things. But the bottom line for me is that “Rushmore,” on some essential chemical cinematic level, was too flip, too ironic, too whimsical, too in love with its cheeky postmodern self, and (yes, let’s use the word! How could we not?) too twee.   

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Blackening” is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere. The set-up, which feels like a “Friday the 13th” sequel by way of “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” reunites nine old college chums to celebrate Juneteenth weekend in a big roomy house they’ve rented near the woods. (Yes, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods movie, but “cabin” doesn’t describe this place.) As Tina Turner’s cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” spins on the turntable, the first two to arrive, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), find their way to the basement game room, which has shelves of old board games, an ancient TV set, a Ouija board, and a prominently displayed game called The Blackening. Taking the box cover off, they discover, to their horror, that there’s a plastic Sambo head in the middle of the board, which asks questions like “What’s the first Black character to survive a horror movie?” For a few minutes, we’re in the terrain of “Scream” by way of “Get Out.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.