Owen Gleiberman Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Clayton Davis A24 and Apple Original Films have released the first trailer for “Causeway,” their new drama starring Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence.  Lawrence stars as Lynsey, a military engineer who returns to the United States from Afghanistan after suffering a debilitating brain injury after an IED explosion.   After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Lawrence, who also serves as one of the film’s producers, garnered rave reviews for her performance. The film hopes to find a pathway into a crowded lead actress field.  

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.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every horror movie is about pain, but only the “Hellraiser” series is about sadomasochism — the electricity and agony of it, the higher calling of it. “Hellraiser,” a reboot of the franchise that began in 1987 and has given us nine sequels (time flies when you’re having fun imagining yourself being tortured for fun), is a movie that honors the subversive tug of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart.” But it takes a long time for the new “Hellraiser” to get to what devotees of the series would call the good stuff. When it does, however, the movie doesn’t hold back. Flesh is torn and frayed, flesh is peeled and sliced, flesh gets split wide open with mystical mechanical devices. The film’s brutal final act may put you in mind of such queasy landmarks of cinematic mutilation as “Audition,” “The Cell,” the “Saw” series, the 2018 remake of “Suspiria,” and David Cronenberg’s recent return to body horror “Crimes of the Future.”

Anna Tingley The furry friends of the Justice League can now be enjoyed on 4K. After arriving on HBO Max last month, “DC League of Super-Pets” will finally be released on 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray and DVD on Oct. 4. The superhero comedy smashed the box office in July, beating out Jordan Peele’s “Nope” with an impressive $25 million debut. Based on the DC Comic of the same name, the film follows Superman’s dog Krypto the Super-Dog, played by Dwayne Johnson, as he teams up with the rest of the Justice League critters to rescue their kidnapped owners. Krypto’s main ally is Ace the Bat-Hound (Batman’s dog, voiced by Kevin Hart), alongside a group of sheltered animals voiced by Natasha Lyonne, Vanessa Bayer, Diego Luna, Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz, among others. The main villain of the film is Lula, a silky-voiced guinea pig played by Kate McKinnon who attempts to foil Krypto’s grand plans. “Though very much a comedy about a scruffy team of critter heroes, it’s also a movie that makes room for the famed demigods of the DC universe; it’s a full-on superhero extravaganza,” writes Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman in his review. “Watching it, what you realize — it’s something we all know but don’t think about too often — is that the gargantuan comic-book movie spectacles that our culture is fatally addicted to are all, in essence, cartoons.” So, how can you watch “DC: League of Super-Pets” online? You can stream the film with an HBO Max account, with plans starting at $9.99/month. Or, starting Oct. 4, you can purchase the film digitally on Amazon Prime and order the Blu-ray version in 4k below: Courtesy of Amazon

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial” sounds like the tawdriest of TV-movies, with any vestige of shame left on the cutting-room floor. It definitely is that, yet it’s worth noting that this exact sort thing has been around for decades. It just didn’t used to come off the assembly line quite so quickly. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, the landscape was littered with made-for-TV movies that jumped on tabloid-ready stories — The Jacksons! Jim Jones! The Menendez brothers! The Beverly Hills madam! The rape of Richard Beck! — and squeezed out whatever juice was left in them. “Hot Take” isn’t much different. It feeds on our collective desire, which is apparently limitless, to see adequate-but-not-never-good-enough actors acting out the infamous scenes we’ve read or heard about, bringing those squalid episodes to life. Except that the whole problem with this form is that the dramatized version rarely ends up looking half as real as what was in our imaginations.

J. Kim Murphy “Smile” has something grin about this weekend. The creeper is projected to land a $19 million debut from 3,645 locations. It’s a fantastic start for the genre film, which carries a modest $17 million production budget. Compared to other original horror entries this year, Universal’s supernatural kidnap thriller “The Black Phone” kicked off with $23 million while 20th Century Studios’ “Barbarian” opened to $10 million. “Smile” landed a mildly positive “B-” grade through research firm Cinema Score, though such a figure is standard for a horror release. The film has drawn good buzz with solid reviews, scoring a 79% from top critics on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Variety‘s chief film critic Owen Gleiberman praised the film in his review, writing that it “sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Munsters,” the director Rob Zombie makes a game attempt to pass off his amateurishness as attitude. It’s like watching a Tim Burton film with the cheekiness turned up to 11 and the film technique dialed down to 2. Yet “The Munsters,” the family-of-ghouls ’60s sitcom that Zombie is adapting, was such a ticky-tacky piece of gothic bat-house surrealism that the movie, broad and slovenly as it is, works more than it doesn’t. The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way. “The Munsters” debuted in 1964, in the middle of the age of theater-of-the-absurd American sitcoms, yet the show, if anything, was less corny, less obvious, and lighter on its feet than this overstuffed update/reboot, with its Famous Monsters of Filmland cameos and contempo catch phrases. Instead of taking all his cues from the show, Zombie, who wrote the script (you can feel his joy in giving Herman the groan-worthy vaudeville one-liners he delivers as if they were gems), has dreamed up the Munsters’ origin story. (As if anyone was asking for that.) It’s all about how Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), a maiden vampire with two-tone hair and an undead glow, living with her vampire dad The Count (Daniel Roebuck) in a Transylvania castle of psychedelic chintz, recovers from her life of bad dates with bad monsters — we see one with Orlock, the rat-man bloodsucker of “Nosferatu,” played by Richard Brake as the cuddliest of creeps.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Smile” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can. She sees faces — or, rather, a spirit, a something, that reveals itself in people’s faces. She can feel it lurking; the spirit’s signature is a face that will stare back at her with an evil smile, a scary grin of the damned. Describing all this, Laura becomes so distraught that she starts to convulse. Then the doctor turns around, seeing a smashed flowerpot on the floor, and Laura has disappeared. But no! She’s there, with a pottery shard in hand. And now she’s the one smiling, as she digs the shard into her neck and scrapes it along, slitting her throat in blood-gushing slow motion. Put on a happy face!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We live in an age when all kinds of behavior that was once not thought of as scandalous is now scandalous. Yet the mentality of “calling people out” can extend to less serious and sometimes even trivial things. That’s been the drama of “Don’t Worry Darling” — and by drama, I don’t mean the story of a Stepford housewife, played by Florence Pugh, who wakes up to discover that the candy-colored ’50s dreamworld she’s been living in is a carefully constructed nightmare. That drama, as I wrote in my review, is just okay; it starts enticingly and then loses steam. But the offscreen drama? That’s been a gift of gossip that keeps on giving. (If you want to know what Neil Postman meant by the title of his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” look no further than Spitgate.)

J. Kim Murphy It’s been a rambling, rocky odyssey to the release of “Don’t Worry Darling” — one involving canceled late-night appearances, rumors of production rivalries and conspiratorial frame-by-frame analysis of red carpet body language and an alleged loogie trajectory. But there was always going to be an opening weekend at the end of this road. And the numbers show that Olivia Wilde has directed a hit. “Don’t Worry Darling” should have no trouble topping the domestic box office, projecting a $21 million debut from 4,113 theaters. The film earned $9.4 million from opening day and Thursday previews — a more-than-solid figure for an original film that carries a modest $35 million production budget.

Wilson Chapman editorAlejandro González Iñárritu has released the first trailer for his Netflix Oscar contender “Bardo” — and the entire movie is now 22 minutes shorter.The Mexican filmmaker and two-time best director winner’s eighth film, “Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths),” premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. After screening at Venice and Telluride, Iñárritu went back into the edit room and cut down 22 minutes from the film, bringing its runtime to two hours and 32 minutes, without credits.“The first time I saw my film was with 2,000 people in Venice,” Iñárritu told IndieWire. “That was a nice opportunity to see it and learn about things that could benefit from being tied up a bit, add one scene that never arrived on time, and move the order of one or two things. Little by little, I tightened it, and I am very excited about it.”

Zack Sharf Ana de Armas is earning some of the best reviews of her career for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” and yet she’s well aware that it will be her nude scenes that end up getting the most exposure online. As the actor said during her Variety cover story interview, “I know what’s going to go viral, and it’s disgusting.” “Blonde” is set to stream globally on Netflix starting Sept. 28, which means viewers will have the ability to clip scenes from the film or take screenshots and share them online. De Armas expects her nude scenes to circulate widely online, but that reception to the film never scared her off from taking on the role of Monroe.

BreAnna Bell Variety received three Eddie & Ozzie Awards for editorial design excellence on the evening of Sept. 13. Presented by Folio, the winners and special mentions were announced at this year’s gala event at the City Winery New York. The publication took home the Eddie award for website in the business-to-business category. Honorable mentions for the category included SevenFifty Daily, Fierce Pharma and strategy+business. Variety also won the Ozzie award for best photography, business-to-business, for its 2021 Power of Women cover featuring “I May Destroy You” creator Michaela Coel. The cover story, written by senior entertainment writer Angelique Jackson, followed Coel’s shift in focus to new stories following the success of the HBO limited series. Coel won an Emmy award in the category of writing for a limited series for the show in 2021.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re someone who considers themself a foodie (and I totally am), chances are there was a moment in the last few years when you had The Awakening. It may have been when the waiter was describing the veal marrow with beat foam served with baby lettuces from New Zealand. It may have been when you were eating the red snapper that was cooked halfway through, like a rare steak, and you thought, “I love sushi, I love cooked fish, but I’m not sure this is really the best of both worlds.” It may have been when you saw the bill. Whatever the trigger, that was the moment you looked up from your plate and realized that high-end foodie culture has become a serious annoyance. It’s gotten too fussy, too pricey, too full of itself, too not filling (of yourself), too avant-garde and conceptual, too tied to The Salvation of the Planet, too much of an ordeal. Did I mention too pricey? It used to be that if you wanted to ridicule culinary mania, you mocked someone like Guy Fieri. But he has risen from the ashes of infamy to a kind of born-again respectability (and yes, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” was always a great show). Now, if you want to ridicule culinary mania, the most natural targets are restaurants like The French Laundry in Napa Valley or Bros’ in Southern Italy, places where the 12-course “tasting menu” can inspire you to think, as one blogger put it, that “there was nothing even close to an actual meal served.”