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Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I will never forget the first time I saw Devo. It was October 14, 1978, and my college roommates and I were watching “Saturday Night Live.” The band, which I had never heard of (I would guess that was true of 98 percent of the people watching the show), came on in their yellow jumpsuits, stiff and mechanical, swiveling like angry androids as they performed their brutalist robo version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” When the song ended, one of the band members shot up his hand in what looked kind of like a Hitler salute.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We look at famous actors as role models, tending to see their personal lives as soap opera, as projection, as aspiration. But the story of Christopher Reeve is different. His life became a parable.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic More actors than ever are now stepping behind the camera to take a shot at directing. To me, they always end up falling into one of three categories. There are the ones who simply aren’t very good at it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There was a time, in the ’90s, when indie film noir thought it was being hip by imitating the trappings of ’40s thrillers ­— the dark shadows, Venetian blinds and “slinky” femme fatales. But a true noir never really looks back; it’s always pushing forward, toward fresh new varieties of desire and dread. “Love Lies Bleeding” is like that.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For some of us, “American Fiction” has a satirical audacity that’s funny right out of the gate, gathers speed and force on the runway — and then, somehow, just when the comedy should be taking off, it turns muted and moralistic instead. I think the hitch is that after Jeffrey Wright’s Monk sells his fake memoir of Black street life, there’s a strong urge to see him — and the film — take a certain vengeful joy in how the book’s popularity skewers the racism of clueless white people. Instead, Monk is made so miserable by what happens that the movie never allows itself to discover that joy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Presence,” a ghost story directed by Steven Soderbergh, is set entirely inside a lovely, renovated, 100-year-old suburban home, and before the characters even have a chance to move in, the place is already occupied. The camera literally seems to be peering at things, staring out the second-floor windows, then coming down the stairs to witness the arrival of a harried real-estate agent, then the family of four she’s about to sell the house to. Darting from room to room in an unbroken wide-angle-lens shot, the camera gives us an impromptu tour of the house, letting us drink in the crisp mint-green walls, the vintage wood that lines everything (windows, doors, stairway, fireplace), the ancient smoke-glass mirror and polished oak-board floors and elegant sprawling kitchen.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Skywalkers: A Love Story” lends new meaning to the words “high anxiety.” It’s a documentary set in the world of rooftoopers, the new generation of daredevils who scale the tallest buildings they can find, climbing to the tips of skyscrapers and posting top-of-the-world footage of themselves on social media. Directed by Jeff Zimbalist (a former rooftopper himself), the film is brilliantly edited, and it’s full of amazing, terrifying, transfixing verité shots of figures walking on girders, sprawling on ledges, and scaling the spindly, often curved spires that shoot out of the tops of buildings, consisting up close of ladders in the form of precarious slats.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Even next to David Bowie, with his alien regalia and mutating persona, it was Brian Eno who always seemed like the supreme spaceman of the pop-music universe. In 1972, when he first came onto the scene as the 24-year-old synthesizer wizard of Roxy Music, he sported a look that was pure glam, except that he somehow appeared even more baroque than the gender-bending rock stars of the time (the New York Dolls, Bowie, Lou Reed), because they were Dionysian pansexual strutters, whereas Eno was his own unique thing: a delicate sci-fi gamine, a geek in thrift-shop drag.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The feelings some of us have about the Sundance Film Festival border on the religious. I don’t mean that we’re a cult; I mean that the force that Sundance represents is a religion worth believing in. By the end of the 1980s, the action/comedy/horror/fantasy grind of Hollywood cinema had become bloated and exhausting.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Remaking one of the most definitive films of a generation is not easy, but such is the task given to the cast of the new “Mean Girls.” A new spin on Tina Fey’s 2004 classic that throws in a handful of songs from the movie’s 2018 Broadway musical adaptation, this new iteration of “Mean Girls” aims to be a breakthrough moment for its talented cast of up-and-coming stars, just as the original was for the likes of Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan and more. While the new “Mean Girls” has earned mixed reviews from film critics, many agree the cast is far and away its strongest element.

Ethan Shanfeld David Gordon Green has exited “The Exorcist: Deceiver,” the 2025 sequel to last year’s poorly received sequel in the horror franchise. Universal and Blumhouse are searching for a new director.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Kristen Stewart is Variety’s Sundance cover star and said while recording a “Know Their Lines” video that she “hated” making “Charlie’s Angels,” the Elizabeth Banks-directed action-comedy that flopped at the box office in fall 2019. Stewart was joined in the film by Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska. While reviews were mixed, Stewart’s performance as the rebellious Sabina earned widespread acclaim.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Not every movie — indeed, almost no movie — was meant to be turned into a musical. But the trend of doing so has become more common over the last two decades, and when you see a movie-to-musical transformation that really works, a surprising alchemy occurs.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Night Swim,” a supernatural thriller about a ghost-plagued pool, is attempting to start the 2024 box office with a splash. The Universal Pictures film, which marks the year’s first nationwide release, is targeting a debut of $9 million to $11 million from 3,200 North American theaters. It’s a decent start for the $15 million-budgeted movie, which won’t face competition on the horror front until March’s haunted-teddy-bear-inspired “Imaginary.” “Night Swim,” written and directed by Bryce McGuire and starring Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, follows a family who finds out that an otherwordly presence haunts the backyard swimming pool in their new home.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A year ago, “M3GAN,” one of the snazziest films ever produced by Blumhouse Productions, was the exception to the rule of first-weekend-of-January trash thrillers. The movie was witty and shivery in a preposterous way, its robot doll scenario actually had a thing or two to say about AI, and it gave us the year’s most memorable android-girl dance meme — at least, until Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams danced with her hands to Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary.” But now, opening in the same junkyard weekend slot, we have another Blumhouse production, “Night Swim,” which restores a certain order to the cinematic universe by being as tepid and unscary as a proper early-in-January movie should be.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every few years, the Golden Globe awards have a category hiccup. In 2015, the Ridley Scott/Matt Damon Robinson-Crusoe-in-space sci-fi movie “The Martian” was nominated (and won) for best motion picture — musical or comedy, even though the movie contained no songs and no one thought it was a comedy. A month ago, in that same category, the Globes gave a nomination to “May December,” Todd Haynes’ acclaimed but hard-to-categorize film based, not so loosely, on the true story of Mary Kay Letourneau.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Zack Snyder is currently leading the Netflix charts with his space opera “Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire,” and he recently got a huge sign of support from none other than Christopher Nolan. In a profile published by The Atlantic, Nolan said Snyder’s influence on cinema is so dominant that part of his touch can be felt in any “superhero science-fiction film coming out these days.” Nolan served as a producer on Snyder’s “Man of Steel” (2013), which was based on a story Nolan cracked with his “Dark Knight” trilogy co-writer David S. Goyer.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Starting in the 2000s, for a little over a decade, 3D was sold as a value-added feature of moviegoing, even though, with rare exceptions (e.g., the “Avatar” films), it never worked too well or added very much. (I would argue that it subtracted.) In most cases, 3D was a rip-off — a carny-barker way for studios to jack up ticket prices.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A convincing romantic and erotic attraction, we can all agree, is one of the keys to a good rom-com. Do you believe these two people love each other? Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell definitely have that in “Anyone But You.” It begins with the simple fact that both are such splendid camera objects. She, with her goldfish eyes and pout of self-possession, looks like a more wised-up, no-nonsense Brigitte Bardot, while he, with his squinty eyes and killer grin, resembles Tom Cruise with a weird touch of the young Dustin Hoffman’s geek glamour.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Zack Snyder is a pop-fantasy filmmaker who now has a fanboy cult around him. In the two decades since he made his feature directorial debut with the grainy unsettling 2004 reboot of “Dawn of the Dead,” Snyder’s flamboyant fusion of visual wizardry, technological fixation, and kick-ass spirit has made him, at least in some quarters (read: the Comic-Con and video-game demo), a creative hero for the Age of Escapism. Fans who grew up feasting on such Snyder extravaganzas as “300,” “Watchmen,” and “Sucker Punch” then saw his much-ballyhooed entrée into the DC comic-book sphere marked by ambitious but maligned misfires.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Every fan of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) loves the scene where Gene Wilder, as the mystical candy maker, takes his guests on a psychedelic tunnel ride, zooming through the bowels of the Chocolate Factory as he chants a little verse (“There’s no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going…”), getting angrier and more hysterical by the second. Wilder’s Wonka was a sweetheart, but he had a hidden maniacal side. And in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Tim Burton’s majestically wacked 2005 remake, Johnny Depp, then at the apex of his movie stardom, went full Depp, playing Wonka like some louche vampiristic cross between Anna Wintour and Michael Jackson.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. After debuting at Cannes Film Festival and then hitting theaters in October, Martin Scorsese‘s star-studded crime epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” will be available to purchase on digital and on-demand streaming beginning Tuesday, Dec. 5.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Christmas is not about money,” says Pepper (Jillian Bell), the passive-aggressive Christmas store elf in “Candy Cane Lane.” “Except that it is.” She could almost be describing Christmas movies. From the start, they’ve paired a celebration of the Christmas spirit, in all its enveloping toastiness, with a theme of raw economic desperation. You can trace this right back to the original Christmas movie — “A Christmas Carol,” and by that I don’t even mean the assorted film versions (though I grew up with them and especially loved the 1951 version with Alastair Sim) but the Charles Dickens novella, published in 1843, which essentially invented the modern Christmas.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In body-swap comedies, the acting is its own kind of brazen put-on fun. Adult actors get to channel their inner innocent kid; young actors get to channel their “serious” adult. And that’s why, ever since the original “Freaky Friday” (1976) brought this genre into being, it’s been marked by instances of true Hollywood artistry, like Tom Hanks’ classic performance in “Big” (though that wasn’t technically a swap comedy) or the lyrically funny bedlam that Jennifer Garner brought off in “13 Going on 30,” one of the best movies of its year.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The Hollywood biographical drama — or biopic, to use the word that always makes it sound like a dental instrument — is enjoying its mega-moment. “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic about the father of the atomic bomb, proved that a story-of-a-life movie could be as big and coruscating as the cosmos; not so incidentally, it’s garnered Nolan the most ecstatic reviews of his career.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Saban Films has acquired U.S. rights to “Knox Goes Away,” a thriller about a contract killer with dementia that wasdirected by and stars Michael Keaton.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What is Joaquin Phoenix so unhappy about? And so twitchy? We’ve all seen someone triumph at the Oscars and use their acceptance speech to push a social cause (in fact, it’s almost required). But I’ve never seen a speech quite like the one Phoenix gave in 2020 when he took the best actor award for “Joker.” The film had gotten mixed reviews from critics (what were they so unhappy about?), so the win carried an element of vindication.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ridley Scott is shrugging off the negative reviews coming out of France for his new historical epic “Napoleon,” which stars Joaquin Phoenix as the infamous French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as his wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais. Reviews are all over the place for the biographical drama.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Dashing Through the Snow,” Lil Rel Howery has the off-the-cuff funk energy of a hustler who’s so quick that you believe his spiel before you’ve had the chance to outthink it. The whole issue of believing is key to the movie, since Howery plays Santa Claus — or, perhaps, a petty criminal who’s pretending to be Santa Claus. The character calls himself Nick, and he’s dressed as a variation on the old-school Victorian Santa: half-frame glasses, a coat festooned with gold buttons and paramilitary shoulder flaps, a vest of gold finery, along with a few token bits of street cool (pearl earring, two-tone beard, fingerless leather gloves).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “When You Wish Upon a Star” is one of those songs, like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” that’s bigger than a song. It was first heard, of course, in the 1940 Walt Disney animated classic “Pinocchio,” where it was sung by Jiminy Cricket.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Thanksgiving,” a cheerfully debased — or maybe I should say de-basted — slasher film directed by Eli Roth, marks the second time that one of the luscious mock trailers from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse” has been spun into a feature film. The first such movie, Rodriguez’s “Machete,” worked better than anyone might have expected; it gave Danny Trejo perhaps the best lead role of his career, and it was tasty enough in its high-zooming vengeful action hyperbole to spawn a sequel. Roth’s trailer for “Thanksgiving,” on the other hand, was a bloody perfect, outrageously transgressive parody of the holiday horror genre that had long gone out of style.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the most shockingly funny moment of Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” Miles Raymond, the desperate English teacher and wine aficionado (that is, alcoholic with good taste) played by Paul Giamatti, has just learned that his book was turned down by the publisher he had his hopes pinned on. It’s more than a rejection; it’s the death of his dream. Miles is in the middle a chi-chi Napa Valley wine tasting, and suddenly he’s in dire need of a drink.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Ninety-seven times out of 100, a movie makes its moral judgments for us. Yes, there’s a haunting ambiguity to films like “The Conformist” or “Taxi Driver” or “Tár.” But when was the last time you saw moral ambiguity in a genre movie? Even the “Mad Max” films, in their visionary savagery, draw a clean line between nobility and treachery, speed-demon heroism and outlaw selfishness. But “Concrete Utopia” is a dystopian disaster movie with a difference.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Rockism, in case you don’t know the term, is the school of thought that holds the noisy “purity” of rock ‘n’ roll to be morally and aesthetically superior to the “corruption” of pop. There are numerous iconic examples of rockism.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Marvels,” Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a snarky but beaming-eyed Pakistani-American teenage mutant ninja fangirl, is seated in her bedroom in Jersey City, sketching comic-book panels in which she imagines herself part of a team with her idol, Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Fifty years ago, the release of two movies — “Jaws” in 1975, and “Star Wars” in 1977 — changed movies, America, and the world, not just by giving rise to “the blockbuster mentality” but by ushering in the cinematic age of all-popcorn-all-the-time. There had been antecedents, of course. In hindsight, much of our fantasy culture sprung from the loins of J.R.R.