Author: Owen Gleiberman (1-10 of 244)

Feb 9 2012 01:49 PM ET

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

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Filed under: Movies and tagged: , , ,
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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Filed under: Movies and tagged: , , , ,

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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Filed under: Elizabeth Olsen, News and tagged: , , , ,
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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Filed under: News and tagged: , , , , , ,
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 »

Jan 23 2012 12:49 PM ET

Sundance: In 'Red Hook Summer,' Spike Lee does the wrong thing

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Filed under: News and tagged: , , ,
red-hook-summer

Image Credit: David Lee

When Spike Lee threw a small fit last night during his Q&A after the premiere of Red Hook Summer, is it because he was angry at Hollywood — or because he sensed that the audience didn’t really like his movie, and he was working off his disappointment by finding a big bad target to hit? My own feeling is that if the film had been better, he might not have been reduced to griping about the movies the Man won’t let him make. For Red Hook Summer isn’t just a letdown. It’s a bit of an ordeal. READ FULL STORY »

Jan 22 2012 12:49 PM ET

Sundance: Richard Gere rules in the tasty 'Arbitrage.' Plus, a possible festival award winner (though for the wrong reasons)

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Filed under: News and tagged: , , ,
Arbitrage

Image Credit: Myles Aronowitz

Every year at Sundance since the 2008 economic meltdown, there has been a movie that’s looked at the new America through the lens of finance; each of these films has been juicy and enlightening in equal measure. Back in 2009, just a few months after the crisis hit, Steven Soderbergh showed up with his slyly arresting, shot-on-the-fly The Girlfriend Experience. 2010 gave us the wrenching executive-downsize drama of The Company Men, and last year it was Margin Call, that enthralling look at greed and guilt on Wall Street. This year, the big-money spectacle is Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage, a tasty financial thriller starring Richard Gere as an investment titan who is standing at the precipice. READ FULL STORY »

Jan 21 2012 12:29 PM ET

Sundance: Even if you've seen all three 'Paradise Lost' films, 'West of Memphis' casts its own dark spell

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Filed under: News and tagged: , , ,
west-of-memphis-sign

Image Credit: Olivia Fougeirol

I went into West of Memphis, the new documentary, financed by Peter Jackson, about the West Memphis Three case — the gruesome 1993 child murders in Arkansas; Damien Echols, along with comrades Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, tried and convicted as a weirdo-outsider-satanist; the corruption and injustice; the years of protest; the trio’s release from prison last August — with a blend of curiosity and trepidation. I was intensely interested to see if the movie could show us something new, and maybe even revelatory, about the case. But I admit that I was more than a little skeptical about whether that could happen. READ FULL STORY »

Jan 11 2012 12:10 PM ET

Owen's awards-movie scorecard: Who said all this stuff gets to be decided before the movies even come out?

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the-artist-oscar

Image Credit: Peter Iovino; Albert Watson/Oscar STATUETTE ©

A few weeks ago, the holiday movie season — or, at least, the conventional wisdom on it — went a little nutty. The media decreed the following things: that Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, with a $39.6 million opening weekend gross, was a disappointment; that Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, with a $23 million opening-weekend gross, was also a disappointment; and that The Descendants (closing in on $30 million) was underperforming. These weren’t opinions — they were incontrovertible movie-industry facts, delivered with the requisite tut-tutting of sky-is-falling doom. As for the awards season, that had all been sorted out, thank you, even though most of the relevant films had barely even begun to be seen by audiences. The Artist, mopping up critics’ awards, had Harvey Weinstein behind it, going into full-court-press Oscar mode, so of course it was foregone that that was going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Best Actor looked like a runoff between George Clooney and The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin. And The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? Sorry, not even in the running. Not an “awards film.” (Too violent! Too pulpy!) READ FULL STORY »

Dec 16 2011 12:39 PM ET

Lisa and Owen talk about their No. 1 movies of the year (and a few other surprises)

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Filed under: Movies and tagged: ,

I know people who don’t take top 10 lists very seriously. But really, what do they know? I’ve always felt that our critical judgments — not just mine or Lisa’s, but anyone’s — are far from infallible. That’s why the end of the year offers such a great, and essential, opportunity for a critic to take stock, to look at the movies that really mattered to us the most. To see Lisa and my complete Best and Worst lists, you’ll have to go to the print issue of EW, but below, we talk about our No. 1 choices (think: cosmic) and a few others that made our lists. And once you’ve heard ours, don’t be shy (as if any of you could be). What were your favorites this year?

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