Author: Owen Gleiberman (1-10 of 249)

May 16 2012 02:59 PM ET

Cannes 2012: The Americans take over, starting with Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom'

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Moonrise-Kingdom

Image Credit: Film Images

Look out, most prestigious and glamour-drenched international movie showcase/market in the world! The Americans have taken over the 65th Festival de Cannes. They have rolled out the big guns and the big talent — and no, I don’t mean that the festival has been anchored to the premiere of some e-ticket popcorn showpiece like Robin Hood or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as happened in recent years. (This year, the token Hollywood vulgarity is Madagascar 3, which has so nothing to do with this festival that no one has to pretend.) The films with the featured slots, the ones generating the most buzzy energy in the competition roster, the ones that everyone is excited to see because they may be good movies, lean toward brash and brawny American subjects and/or sexy American talent. READ FULL STORY »

Apr 9 2012 09:50 AM ET

'Titanic' is a great film. It's also the movie that gave rise to hater culture

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titanic

Image Credit: Everett Collection

James Cameron’s Titanic is one of the most successful movies of all time, and I have no problem saying that it’s also one of the most beloved movies ever made. (We’re now in the era when success doesn’t always hinge on deep fan love; witness The Phantom Menace, the Transformers films, or Khloe Kardashian.) Where Titanic may well be unique in the history of cinema is that it is also, arguably, the most hated beloved movie ever made. Any number of celebrated films, of course, have provoked backlashes. Just think of the strain of carping snootiness that has always gathered, like a pesky mosquito army, around the work of Steven Spielberg (“He’s too sappy! And manipulative!”), or the routine bashing of famous Oscar crowd-pleasers like Marty or Ordinary People or Shakespeare in Love, or my own persistent impatience with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a wandering-through-the-woods saga that I’ve always found to be as ponderous as it is majestic. READ FULL STORY »

Mar 14 2012 11:00 AM ET

Box office disasters: The real lesson of 'John Carter,' and has Eddie Murphy finally run out of words?

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john-carter

Image Credit: Disney Enterprises

The chattering classes of the infotainment-sphere love to kick a movie debacle in the shins. But from the moment that John Carter opened, the perceptions of how big — or maybe not quite so big — a disaster it was were a tad hazy, and they trickled in slowly. A dry dust storm of digital effects, corny fetishized machismo, and bad acting out of the loincloth-and-galactic-tiara school, John Carter, as just about everyone in the solar system had predicted, underperformed in a dramatic way. But was it merely a “disappointment,” or a major flop, or, in fact, a good old-fashioned game-changing heads-will-roll executives-will-commit-seppuku debacle? What did the $30 million opening-weekend gross stacked up against the movie’s $250 million price tag really mean? READ FULL STORY »

Mar 3 2012 02:20 PM ET

'Project X' and 'Chronicle' prove that the found-footage way of making a movie can be applied to...anything. And that now it will be

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project-x

Image Credit: Film Images

A couple of years ago, I was asked, for a feature page in EW, to list my choice for the five most influential movies of the last 20 years. A few of them were no-brainers — you could write a book on the revolution set off by Pulp Fiction — but I spent some time pondering whether I wanted to include The Blair Witch Project. That it was a famously innovative and impactful movie no one could argue; overnight, it had invented the “found footage” genre and made it iconic. A number of films had been influenced by it — most obviously, the Paranormal Activity movies, which proved that the mega-success of Blair Witch was no fluke. With that in mind, I decided to add The Blair Witch Project to the list, but I confess I was flying on a whim of intuition. My choice, in this case, was highly speculative. I even said that the full impact of Blair Witch on film history had yet to be felt. For the truth was that even though the found-footage genre still had some obvious life to it (more Paranormal Activity sequels! More scuzzy Exorcist knockoffs!), you could make a good case that its heyday was behind it, that it was now running on fumes. Because, really, how much more juice could be squeezed out of this gimmick? I hailed Blair Witch as “influential,” but my secret suspicion was that its influence had already peaked. READ FULL STORY »

Feb 23 2012 12:00 PM ET

Imagine a world in which 'Bridesmaids' can win Best Picture...

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bridesmaids-melissa-mccarthy

Image Credit: Suzanne Hanover/Universal Pictures

Take a minute, if you will, to imagine this year’s Academy Awards ceremony as it might unfold in a parallel universe. On this alternate-dimension Oscar night, there are five Best Picture nominees: The Artist, Bridesmaids, The Descendants, The Help, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In a vividly suspenseful contest that even the sharpest Oscar prognosticators all agreed was too close to call, the big award ends up going to a movie that received lavish critical praise, that entertained huge audiences in a splendid fashion, and that single-handedly redefined the landscape for women in Hollywood. When the award is announced, it’s greeted by war whoops of joy — and also by laughter, tears, and a great many dropped jaws. I’m speaking, of course, of Bridesmaids.

You think I’m joking! Well, members of the Academy, the joke’s on anyone who thinks that the scenario I just described would somehow make you look bad. But now let’s talk about how this year’s Oscar night probably will unfold. READ FULL STORY »

Feb 9 2012 01:49 PM ET

'Chronicle': the movie that makes special effects special again

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CHRONICLE

Image Credit: Alan Markfield

In Chronicle, the low-budget sci-fi sleeper hit about three high school dudes who suddenly find themselves blessed (or is it cursed?) with telekinetic powers, Andrew (Dane DeHaan), the most troubled and supernaturally gifted of the three, waves his hand, and a line of police cars shoot backwards as if hit by a tsunami. A baseball hovers in the air, human bodies fly up into the clouds, and a shopping cart rolls through a convenience store as if it had a mind of its own. Pringles potato chips and playing cards go flying. If any, or all, of these events strike you as the sort of routine cinematic wonders that you could easily behold in just about any fantasy film, from X-Men VIII: Superfreaks and Geeks to one made 30 or 40 years ago…well, you’d be right. Yet every time something out of the ordinary happens in Chronicle, it feels freshly minted and kind of awesome. For once (or, at least, for the first time in a long while), a movie’s special effects truly are…special. READ FULL STORY »

Feb 3 2012 03:59 PM ET

Madonna: Owen and Lisa debate her new movie, the historical music-video romance 'W.E.'

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Ah, Madonna. People have been arguing about her ever since that moment in the early ’80s when somebody first blurted out, “She can’t sing — it’s all tricks done in the studio!” and somebody else replied, “She can too sing — I heard her do the entire third verse of ‘Borderline’ a capella in concert, and it was great!” I don’t know if Lisa and my contrasting feelings about W.E., the new movie directed by Madonna, quite rise to that level of mythical debate. Lisa didn’t like the film at all; I didn’t like it…very much (though I thought it showed promise). But you can check out what we had to say about it right here:

 

Jan 28 2012 01:09 PM ET

The Academy Awards have undergone a sea change: They're no longer about the audience

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the-oscars

Image Credit: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

A couple of weeks ago, based on the fact that The Artist, as it began to open across the country, didn’t exactly seem to be setting the box office aflame (I don’t mean when compared to Thor — I mean on the traditional indie-crossover circuit), I made an Academy Awards prediction. It had much in common with a lot of the Academy Awards predictions that people have been making recently, in that it was fearlessly wrong. I said that I thought The Artist had peaked, and that The Help would win Best Picture. That could still happen, of course, but at this point I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, or even a nice steak dinner. Despite its less-than-Richter-scale-rattling performance thus far, The Artist, as it racks up wins (the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild), is looking more and more like a classic Oscar juggernaut, a runaway awards train fueled by the metaphysics of the entertainment-media echo chamber, in which the relentless chatter about the “inevitability” of one movie winning becomes a big part of the reason that it inevitably wins. (It’s Access Hollywood meets the doctrine of predestination. Or maybe just the doctrine of Harvey.) READ FULL STORY »

Jan 26 2012 11:39 AM ET

Sundance: Elizabeth Olsen is a total star in the super-sharp college comedy 'Liberal Arts.' Plus, Frank Langella makes 'Robot and Frank' delectable fluff

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liberal-arts

Image Credit: Jacob Hutchings

Elizabeth Olsen, who was last year’s Sundance It Girl, deserved the terrific reviews she got for Martha Marcy May Marlene. But since the character she was playing was such a spacy languid cult baby, a young woman who’d smudged out her identity and was trying to get it back, the movie still left me wondering: Did Olsen, skillful as she was, have much of a personality? Was she really a star? If, like me, you weren’t sure, then the college comedy Liberal Arts answers the question: She is every inch a star. This dryly affectionate and super-sharp movie was written and directed by its leading man, Josh Radnor, who is like Paul Rudd’s puppyish kid brother and who has cast himself as Jesse, a menschy, bearded 35-year-old admissions counselor in New York City who returns to his leafy, idyllic Midwestern liberal-arts college to help honor his favorite English professor (Richard Jenkins), who’s retiring. READ FULL STORY »

Jan 24 2012 12:19 PM ET

Sundance: 'Bachelorette' is a new kind of chick flick, caustically clever yet without a romantic bone in its body

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Bachelorette_01

Image Credit: Jacob Hutchings

It reduces the hilarious humanity of Bridesmaids to sum it up, simply, as the comedy that proved that girls in a movie could be just as gross and raunchy as guys. Yet there’s no denying that it did prove that. The movie, for all time, busted down that door. Bachelorette, a long-sloshed-night-before-the-wedding comedy that’s as caustic and brittle and high-strung as its damaged-princess heroines, zooms through the door that Bridesmaids kicked open without ever looking back — and, while it’s at it, it busts open half a dozen new ones. In Bachelorette, girls behaving badly isn’t just a joke, it’s a way of life.

In the opening scene, set in Los Angeles, Becky, who is sweet and plus-size and deeply self-conscious about it (she’s played by Rebel Wilson, Kristen Wiig’s cockney freak of a roommate in Bridesmaids), informs her best friend, the lovely platinum-blonde ice queen Regan (Kirsten Dunst), that she’s engaged, an announcement that Regan greets by just about choking on her lunch with jealousy. That’s what a petty, lacquered bitch she is. Most of Bachelorette takes place six months later, in Manhattan, on the eve of Becky’s nuptials, which is of course the perfect occasion for a drug-drenched bachelorette party that spins wildly out of control. But this isn’t a daffy clockwork farce like the Hangover films; it’s more like a relentless, revved-up pageant of naked feminine dysfunction. The setting may be New York, but at heart Bachelorette is a very L.A. movie, one in which vanity has become toxic. It’s a comedy of values about young women who don’t have any. READ FULL STORY »

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