Owen Gleiberman Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jonathan Glazer just delivered the first instant sensation of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. “The Zone of Interest,” only the director’s fourth feature film after “Sexy Beast,” “Birth” and “Under the Skin,” earned a six-minute standing ovation following its world premiere. Glazer’s film is austere and challenging as it tells the story of the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, who have created their dream home directly next to the concentration camp. The constant screams of prisoners, gun shots and smoke from the gas chambers haunt their paradise, but their indifference to such horrors creates a terrifying and sinister juxtaposition.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of the thousands of dramatic feature films that deal with the subject of the Holocaust, few have evoked — or have even tried to — the experience of what went on inside the concentration camps. That’s understandable; the horror of that experience is forbidding and in some ways unimaginable. But there’s a small group of movies, like “Schindler’s List” and “Son of Saul” and “The Grey Zone,” that have met that horror head-on, and in an indelible way. To that list we can now add Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” It’s a remarkable film — chilling and profound, meditative and immersive, a movie that holds human darkness up to the light and examines it as if under a microscope. In a sense, it’s a movie that plays off our voyeurism, our curiosity to see the unseeable. Yet it does so with a bracing originality. “The Zone of Interest” isn’t a portrait of the victims of the Holocaust. It’s a portrait of the perpetrators. Yet what hovers over every moment is a human monstrousness that’s at once inflicted and repressed. The film’s haunting subject is the compartmentalization of evil.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum. It’s the fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” franchise, and though it has its quota of “relentless” action, it rarely tries to match (let alone top) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravura of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” How could it? “Raiders,” whatever one thinks of it as a movie (I always found it a trace impersonal in its ’40s-action-serial-on-steroids excitement), is arguably the most influential blockbuster of the last 45 years, even more so than “Star Wars.” Back in 1977, George Lucas took us through the looking glass of what would become our all-fantasy-all-the-time movie culture. But it was Steven Spielberg, teaming up with Lucas in “Raiders,” who introduced the structural DNA of the one-thing-after-another, action-movie-as-endless-set-piece escapist machine. This means that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” isn’t just coming after four previous “Indiana Jones” films. It’s coming after four decades of high-priced Hollywood action decadence, from the “Fast and Furious” series to the “Mission: Impossible” and “Terminator” and “Lara Croft” and “Transformers” and latter-day “Bond” films (not to mention the Marvel space operas), all of which owe a boundless debt to the aggro zap of the “Raiders” aesthetic.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude (the 1971 IRA prison hunger strike in “Hunger,” the complex horrors of slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the collision of gritty city politics and feminine revolt in “Widows,” the epochal crackdown on West Indian immigrants in London in “Mangrove”) and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

Naman Ramachandran Signature Entertainment has snapped up U.K. and Ireland rights to Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy “You Hurt My Feelings” from FilmNation Entertainment. Directed by Nicole Holofcener, the film stars Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies (“The Crown”) as a couple whose marriage is thrown into turmoil when she overhears his honest reaction to her latest book. The cast also includes Owen Teague, David Cross, Arian Moayed and Michaela Watkins. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will close Sundance London. Reviewing the film for Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman said: “The key to ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ is that the entire movie turns into a satire of what has become our fetishistically supportive and oversensitive therapeutic culture of positivity. All these things, in a way, are necessary. But maybe, the film suggests, we have tried to heal ourselves a little too much. Maybe we need a little more naked honesty mixed in with the wellness.”

J. Kim Murphy The book club can’t topple comic books, as Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” will easily hold off the opening of “Book Club: The Next Chapter” to retain the top spot at the box office. “The Next Chapter” earned $2.14 million on its opening day, projecting a debut of $7 million from 3,508 locations for the three-day frame. That’s on the lower end of estimates heading into the weekend. While there’s hope that the Focus Features release will be able to earn a boost in ticket sales on the Mother’s Day holiday, the sequel won’t be able to match its predecessor. Released by Paramount in 2018, the first “Book Club” debuted to $13.5 million before legging out to a $68 million gross in North America — a solid result for an older-skewing comedy, especially before the COVID pandemic impacted the theatrical landscape.

Ethan Shanfeld Variety garnered a record 96 nominations for the SoCal Journalism awards sponsored by the Los Angeles Press Club, with nods across magazine and entertainment journalism, art and photography, video, audio, online content and social media during the 2022 calendar year. Among the nominations announced Friday were Tim Gray for print journalist of the year and Clayton Davis for online journalist of the year. In addition, Owen Gleiberman, Chris Willman and Daniel D’Addario were nominated as entertainment journalists of the year. “We are extremely proud of our newsroom for a banner year in record-breaking traffic, hard-hitting investigative journalism, profile writing and video. These nominations are a testament to the great work Variety is doing covering the entertainment industry,” said Variety co-editor-in-chiefs Ramin Setoodeh and Cynthia Littleton.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In a movie career that stretches back 25 years, Jennifer Lopez has on occasion done flaked-out underworld thriller romance (“Out of Sight”), capery action (“Parker”) and revenge (“Enough”). Yet she has never placed herself at the center of such a down-and-dirty, grimly overwrought, execute-now-and-ask-questions-later B-movie as “The Mother.” I’m tempted to call the film “minimalist,” because if you consider its bare-bones screenplay (by three writers!), its convoluted utilitarian set-up, its 2D villains, and its essential formulaic momentum, it’s a prime example of action filmmaking made basic. Yet “The Mother” is a Netflix action movie, which means that it has a certain flavor of ambition mixed into its pulp stew. The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad. Lopez, as a military sniper turned broker of underground arms deals turned FBI informant turned savagely cool-headed protector of her 12-year-old daughter, is playing a badass not so far removed from those played by Jason Statham or (in his grade-B prime) Bruce Willis, and she’s up to the task. She shoots, she stabs, she chops windpipes, she motorcycles down stone stairways in one of those chase-through-an-ancient-city action scenes (this one takes place in Havana), she tortures a man by punching him with a fist wrapped in barb wire, she grimaces in muscle-torn agony but mostly looks frozen and implacable. Even more important, she puts her own spin on those familiar motions.

Naman Ramachandran U.K.-based sales and distribution outfit Blue Finch Films has boarded international sales, excluding North America, for William Shatner documentary “You Can Call Me Bill” from Legion M and Exhibit A Pictures. Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, who has previously helmed documentaries such as “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” and “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist,” the film had its world premiere at SXSW 2023 as part of the Documentary Spotlight section. The film is an intimate portrait of William Shatner’s personal journey across nine decades, stripping away all the masks he has worn during his storied career – most famously the Star Trek franchise – to reveal the man behind it all. The first and only feature-length documentary dedicated to Shatner’s life, career and philosophy, it delves into his most fervent passions, hopes and concerns, through a thematic distillation of his most recent autobiographical songs and a deep dive into the farthest reaches of his filmography.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Does chronic Lyme disease exist? That’s the question that haunts “The Quiet Epidemic,” Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch’s worthy and provocative documentary about the highly controversial syndrome. (The movie premieres on VOD on May 16.) The filmmakers argue, with unflinching advocacy and some very good reporting, that chronic Lyme disease most definitely exists. Among other things, “The Quiet Epidemic” is a portrait of individuals whose lives have been ravaged by it. Yet the movie, in its doggedly opinionated way, does acknowledge the profundity of the debate. The medical establishment, led by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, has long held the position — one it maintains to this day — that Lyme disease is a real thing, eminently curable with a two-to-four week regimen of antibiotics, but that chronic Lyme disease, with sometimes devastating symptoms stretching on for months, years, even decades, is not backed up by the science.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s beyond obvious that women deserve a movie that portrays and celebrates them in their sixties and seventies reveling in the joys of romantic adventure and uninhibited sex. It’s not so obvious that they deserved “Book Club,” the 2018 comedy about four hale, hearty, and prosperous senior friends who read “Fifty Shades of Grey” in their monthly literary white-wine klatsch, only to discover that E.L. James’s S&M princess fantasy jump-starts their hibernating libidos and/or their desire to commit to the men who are courting them. You could use a whole Thesaurus paragraph of withering descriptives to evoke the sort of movie “Book Club” was. It was prefab, it was cookie-cutter, it was paint-by-numbers, it was broad enough to play to the peanut gallery, it was four glorified sitcoms jammed into one overly synthetic package.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Watching a police-procedural homicide drama, whether it’s the grungiest of VOD potboilers or the most visionary film of the genre, Michael Mann’s silvery, dread-drenched “Manhunter,” we more or less know one thing: At the end of two hours, the grisly mystery we’ve been dunked in will have its catharsis and its resolution. We will know who the killer is, and in knowing that a kind of order will have been restored. David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” with its tantalizing ambiguities, might stand as an exception to the form — a singular winding creep-out, without the closure we’re thirsting for — yet even there you feel, by the end, that you’ve glimpsed the face of evil. But “The Night of the 12th,” the French thriller that was nominated for 10 César Awards and won six of them, including best picture (it opens here on May 19), throws the audience a slow-motion curveball that’s intended to tinker with our dreams. And to a degree, it does. Based on a true-crime book by Pauline Guéna, the movie turns into one of the most casually authentic of investigative murder mysteries. Each time we think we’re seeing a classic suspense arc, it unravels into a dead end, and we think to ourselves: Of course. Crime in real life doesn’t necessarily happen so neatly. “The Night of the 12th” is a mostly compelling sit, though what lends the film its singular texture is that it keeps tricking us into thinking it’s a more conventional thriller than it is.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I have a little ritual when it comes to animated films. I try to go into them not knowing who the cast members are. That’s not always possible, of course. For the most part, though, I do my best to ignore the publicity and let the voices I hear surprise me — because if you don’t know who the actors are, you respond, I think, in a less biased and more spontaneous way. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” made my crusade easy, since the film has no opening credits. From the earliest moments, I had no idea who was voicing any of the characters. But I did know this: When the villain, a gigantic fire-breathing horned turtle named Bowser, showed up in his studded-leather arm bands, lowered his fire-red eyebrows into a gleaming, gap-toothed grin of the most insidious megalomania and began to push and order people around, all I could think was, “I like this dude.” 

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Disney+ subscribers will be able to jump into the Quantum Realm next month when “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” hits the streaming service. The film, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Jonathan Majors, will come to Disney+ worldwide on May 17. That’s 89 days after “Quantuamania” opened wide in the U.S. on Feb. 17. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” has been one of the worst-reviewed Marvel movies to date. It hauled in $213 million at the domestic box office during its theatrical run and grossed $261.6 million worldwide; the movie had an estimated production budget of $200 million.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Biopics about star athletes or artists tend to have the same broad shape: the rise to achievement and fame, the fall from triumph (often fueled by some combination of addiction and ego), the restoration to a harder-won glory. A great biopic, like “Get On Up” or “I, Tonya,” will tease a profound portrait of the subject out of that form; a middling one will oversimplify the subject just to hit the right beats. But then there’s a film like “Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World.” That’s not a movie title — it’s the title of a parable. And it’s well chosen, since “Big George Foreman” is about a life that feels so outlandishly ready-made for the ups and downs, the lessons and inspirations, of the superstar biopic genre that you don’t even have to mess with it. The real George Foreman has, in effect, already scripted it for you.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In movies, the word “bomb” has always meant two things, generally at the same time. The first and most important definition of bomb is that a movie has lost a disastrous amount of money. Movies, in general, can’t afford to do that — they’re too expensive to produce. Bombs happen, but as a business model they’re not sustainable. A movie that bombs commercially has never been something to write off as a trivial matter. The second definition of bomb, which is linked to the first (though not automatically), is that a film is spectacularly bad. It is, of course, not axiomatic that a movie that bombs commercially has failed as a work of art. There are movies we think of as classics that crashed and burned at the box office — like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Blade Runner” or “Intolerance” or “The Long Goodbye.” It’s become almost trendy to rescue certain films from the scandal of their box-office infamy. The mother of all those rescue jobs is “Heaven’s Gate,” the grandly picturesque 219-minute Marxist art Western that effectively put a stake through the heart of the New Hollywood, helping to take United Artists down along with it — though it’s a film that numerous observers have re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece. I can’t agree on that one; to me, “Heaven’s Gate” remains a visually stately but indulgent wallow. Nevertheless, it’s always worth standing up for the principle that a box-office fiasco isn’t necessarily a bad film.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The romantic action comedy has always had a breathlessly eager-to-please, overstuffed quality. You might say it’s a what’s-not-to-like genre. We laugh! With pulses racing! And swoon at the moonstruck chemistry! In a superior rom-act-com, like “Romancing the Stone” or “Out of Sight” or “True Lies” or the new “Murder Mystery” sequel, the action is the romance — it’s how the characters connect. (One way the form extends vintage Hollywood screwball is that it tends to be about couples who so dislike each other that only by joining in death-defying scrapes can they melt the ice.) But then there are movies like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” where the love gets sandwiched between vehicular mayhem so aggressive it’s played for “laughs,” and the too-muchness of the whole thing becomes like one of those fast-food fusion experiments. Sorry, but the movie escapism equivalent of a burger topped with a quesadilla served with cheese fries is not my idea of a good time.  

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Nicholas Hoult confirmed in a recent interview with The Guardian that he lost out on roles in “The Batman,” “Mission: Impossible 7” and “Top Gun: Maverick” all in a row. In a new interview with GQ España, the actor stressed that he is “happy” with his career despite these “disappointments.” Hoult also went into a bit more detail about the experience of losing the title role in “The Batman” to Robert Pattinson. “Of course,” Hoult said when asked if he would’ve liked to play Bruce Wayne/Batman. “I’m sure if you ask most people, they’ll tell you they’d want to portray that role. I think Matt Reeves’ ideas were fantastic and he made a brilliant movie. And I also think that Rob [Robert Pattinson] did an amazing job with the character and I loved seeing him in it. So I don’t think I would have done as good a job as him ultimately. I don’t think I could have fit as well into the world that Matt created as Rob did.”

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Oscar-winning documentarian Bryan Fogel has signed for representation with Range Media Partners. Fogel is best known for his 2018 film “Icarus,” which exposed Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and the whistleblower at its center. The Netflix title won the Academy Award for best documentary, the first such prize for the streamer. Prior to its crowning moment on the Dolby stage, the film sold for $5 million out of the Sundance Film Festival. Additional laurels for “Icarus” included the special jury prize at that year’s Sundance, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Journalism, and nominations from BAFTA, the television academy and the Directors Guild of America.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Let no one deny it: Rupert Murdoch is clever like a fox. He’s slyer than his adversaries in mainstream media. They still think in real-world terms. But Murdoch thinks in terms of the world that he’s created — the world of fake news, of lies that play because they carry the ring of vengeful mythology (life as a Charles Bronson film that never ends). The world that Fox News pretends is reality. You could make a case that in recent weeks, Murdoch’s circus of happy-talk dystopian propaganda (otherwise known as any random half hour of Fox News) took a major hit. The release of documents subpoenaed during the Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News revealed something that was, or should be, profoundly embarrassing to the network: that there are moments when its star huckster, Tucker Carlson, actually tells the truth (at least in private). The revelation that Carlson, along with a number of Fox News executives, peddled Donald Trump’s crackpot assertion that he won the 2020 election not because they believed it, but because they thought they had to go along with what their viewers wanted to hear, made the Fox team look like craven cowards. The lawsuit never made it to trial, but because those documents were leaked you could say the damage was done. And to keep the trial from happening, Murdoch had to cough up the mother of all defamation settlements: $787.5 million. 

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Last month, to my great surprise, I raved about a Guy Ritchie movie, “Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre,” as an exhilarating exception to the rule of Ritchie’s style-over-substance, more-frosting-than-cake school of crime-thriller grandiloquence. The film bombed, and more critics than not disagreed with me. But I stand by my assessment of “Operation Fortune” as a diabolically entertaining screwball action-espionage caper. If you want to talk about exceptions to the rule, though, that movie has nothing on the new Guy Ritchie film, which is called (wait for it) “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant.” Ritchie’s name was reportedly added to the title because there is already a film in existence called “The Covenant.” But that sounds like an awfully thin reason to suddenly convert Ritchie into a marquee legend, and, in fact, there’s a better reason. Against all odds, he has become one of the best directors working. “The Covenant” isn’t another Ritchie underworld caper. It’s an Afghanistan war drama, and if you’re wondering whether he has made a combat film in some version of the Ritchie style (jazzy violence, fast-break comic-strip dialogue, needle drops), the answer is no. He has put his confectionary flamboyance on hold. “The Covenant” unveils something new: Ritchie the contempo classicist. We’re seeing a born-again filmmaker.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Benita (Julia Mayorga), the young woman at the center of “Rare Objects,” the third feature directed by Katie Holmes, has been through a transformative trauma. In the film’s opening moments, she’s discharged from a mental ward, where she’s been dealing with PTSD; a series of charged flashbacks show us what happened to her. In Manhattan, where she was a university student majoring in economics, she was approached at a bar by a seemingly nice guy, who had a drink with her, and when she went to the restroom he attacked her, shoving her inside and sexually assaulting her. She emerges from this crime a shell of her former self, and Holmes shoots the rape so that we experience how the shock and horror of it could undermine someone’s identity. Benita, out of the hospital, shows up at the home of her doting but quietly stern mother (Saundra Santiago) in Astoria, telling her that she’s taking a break from school; she says nothing at all about what happened to her. She’ll continue to say nothing — to anyone. As she steps back out into the world, hunting for a job, Julia Mayorga acts with a tentative fretful wariness that speaks to the trauma Benita won’t say out loud, and we assume that the movie is going to be about how she confronts that crisis.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If Lars von Trier hadn’t grown top-heavy with the mythology of his self-importance (I’d say that happened around the time of “Antichrist,” in 2009), he might have tossed off a movie like “Sick of Myself” — a social satire in the form of a queasy drama of body horror, and a movie whose disturbing bad-boy tastelessness recalls Von Trier’s “The Idiots,” with a touch of David Cronenberg. This is the second feature by Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director whose first film, “Drib” (2017), was a send-up of the marketing industry, and in a way the new movie is about marketing too. This one, though, takes a viscerally upsetting look at just how far an individual will go to gain attention in the new era of social-media addiction.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sweetwater” is a biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. It’s telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.) There’s a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way the fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. “Sweetwater,” written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie — and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters’ athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. The thunder is hitting HBO Max. “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” is arriving on the streamer, which will soon be renamed to Max, on May 23.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In one of the many jacked-up, bodies-leaping-and-flying, vampire-meets-action-film sequences that punctuate “Renfield,” Dracula (Nicolas Cage), jutting into the movie well before we expect him to, does all the throat-ripping damage he can in a montage that culminates in drapes being thrown open, the sunlight flooding in, and the vampire, in his red bathrobe, bursting into flame. It looks like the climax of many a vampire film, and it leaves Dracula a charred husk. But has he been killed? No way! As Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Dracula’s self-described slave and disciple, explains to us in voice-over, when something like this happens it takes a lot of work to return Dracula to his previous state; it takes many victims for him to feed upon. But with enough blood and enough time, he can claw his way back to his old robust undead form.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There are a lot of reasons why “Air,” the sensational new movie starring Matt Damon and directed by Ben Affleck, is being consumed by audiences with eager pleasure. It’s the rare drama for adults these days that people actually want to see in a movie theater (I don’t mean that to sound negative; the film could jump-start a trend). And that’s no random triumph. “Air,” based on the true story of Nike, Michael Jordan and the man who brought them together, is full of juicy inside talk about money and sports and celebrity and what agents and marketing executives actually do. In that way, it has the qualities that defined both “Jerry Maguire” and “Moneyball.” The script is by Alex Convery, who has come out of nowhere (this is his first produced feature). I would personally like to give a high-five to any screenwriter who creates this kind of dialogue — bright and sharp and nimble, with a cutting worldliness, the kind of conversation that’s been an engine of great films for 100 years. People talking! Spewing what’s on their minds, or deftly concealing it, as we hang on every word. “Air” has come along at just the right moment to remind us that terrific actors delivering savory lines of dialogue is the most special effects that a movie needs.

J. Kim Murphy It’s a box office Koopa d’état. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” continues to super smash its opening projections, drawing $55 million from 4,343 theaters on Friday. Released Wednesday, the film has already earned $137 million in domestic ticket sales. If every dollar were a coin, that would amount to 1.37 million 1-Up mushrooms. That’s a lot of extra lives. The Universal and Illumination film is still on track for a $195 million opening in North America over the five-day Easter weekend frame. That’s way ahead of the $150 million projections that were being reported at the start of the week. Even more impressively, “Super Mario Bros.” now looks to leap to a $368 million global debut. That would become the biggest ever opening for an animated film, though that comes with a huge caveat. The current record holder, 2019’s “Frozen II,” earned $358 million over a traditional three-day window.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. If you missed “Cocaine Bear” in theaters, worry not: the absolutely preposterous slasher comedy about, yes, a coked-up bear, is coming to Peacock on April 14. The Elizabeth Banks-directed film hits the streamer nearly two months after it premiered in theaters, where it beat box office expectations and earned an impressive $24 million during its opening weekend. The wild R-rated movie, inspired by a stranger-than-fiction story about a drug runner’s plane crash, imagines the events that would have transpired if the American black bear that ingested a duffle bag full of blow had lived to tell the tale. It was budgeted at roughly $35 million, which was mostly dedicated to the CGI used to bring to life the coked-out beast alongside the human cast of Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Brooklynn Prince. Its box office success marks another win for Universal following its killer-doll movie “M3GAN,” which collected $170 million globally and, like “Cocaine Bear,” also became available to stream on Peacock only seven weeks after its release.

Brent Lang Executive Editor It’s-a blockbuster! “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” continued to rack up high scores at the box office as it heads into Easter weekend. The animated movie, a collaboration between Illumination, Nintendo and Universal, shows no signs of slowing down, earning a massive $26.5 million on Thursday. That brings its domestic haul to $58.2 million. At this rate, the mustachioed plumber should end his first five days on the big screen with more than $150 million in stateside winnings. Internationally, the movie has earned $62.5 million, pushing global ticket sales to $120.7 million. The week’s other major new release, Amazon Studios’s “Air,” a footwear tale detailing how Nike convinced Michael Jordan to become its most successful brand ambassador, earned $2.4 million on Thursday. That brings the sneaker story’s domestic total to just under $6 million. The film, which stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris Tucker and Viola Davis, is expected to earn $16 million in its first five days in theaters. That’s a mere blip compared to Mario, but a solid result considering the struggles that movies aimed at adults have faced. Affleck directs the film in addition to starring opposite his “Good Will Hunting” buddy Damon. “Air” cost $90 million to make, meaning that Amazon better sell a lot of paper towels to justify that spending.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” launched to the top of box office charts, collecting a mighty $31.7 million on opening day. Ben Affleck’s sports drama “Air,” which also debuted on Wednesday, nabbed $3.2 million from 3,507 venues. After a bigger-than-expected opening day, estimates for Universal and Illumination’s big screen adaptation of the popular “Mario” video game have been revised up to $92 million over the traditional weekend and $141 million in its first five days of release. Those ticket sales continue a strong period at the box office following March releases, “Scream VI,” “Creed III,” “John Wick: Chapter 4” and “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Mario, Luigi and Princess Peach are poised to clobber the box office competition as “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” readies to power past the $100 million mark in its opening weekend. Universal and Illumination’s big screen adaptation of the popular video game, which opens in 4,000 North American theaters on Wednesday, looks to collect a towering $125 million or more in its first five days of release. It’ll be the second 2023 release, following Disney’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” ($106 million) to open above $100 million. “Mario” will easily lead domestic box office charts over last weekend’s champ, “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” as well as fellow newcomer “Air,” a sports drama directed by Ben Affleck.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Brooke Shields came pretty close to starring in Stephen Frears’ 1988 period drama “Dangerous Liaisons” alongside John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and Keanu Reeves. “They told me it came down to me and someone else,” Shields tells me. “They said the other person was this girl not many people knew about. It was Uma Thurman. At that time and that age, it felt so personal, but I’ve learned over time not to take it personally because ‘no’ outweighs ‘yes’ extensively in this business.” Released by Warner Bros., “Dangerous Liaisons” went on to be nominated for seven Oscars, eventually taking home the awards for adapted screenplay, costume design and production design. Christopher Hampton adapted the screenplay from his 1985 play “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” The $14 million film grossed $34.7 million at the box office.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “The Little Mermaid” director Rob Marshall confirmed in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that he met with pop superstar Harry Styles to play the role of Prince Eric opposite Halle Bailey’s Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake. Reports surfaced during the film’s casting process that Styles was being courted to play Prince Eric, but this is the first time Marshall has confirmed that discussions with the Grammy winner took place. Why did Styles turn down Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid” remake? According to Marshall, the reason was twofold: He wanted to take on darker films and didn’t want to be in a musical as he made the jump from pop star to actor.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” gives you a wholesome prankish druggy chameleonic video-game buzz; it’s also a nice, sweet confection for 6-year-olds. Historically, the proverbial problem with live-action movies based on video games — and “Super Mario Bros.,” a leaden dud released 30 years ago, had the dishonor of being the very first one — is that they jam-pack the screen with tropes and fights and characters and landscapes right out of the game, but when it comes to molding all that gimcrackery into, you know, a story, they lose the electronic pulse that made the game addictive. Digital animation is, and always should have been, the true cousin of video games (which are essentially computer fantasies that you control). And “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” takes full advantage of the sculptural liquid zap of the computer-animation medium. Yet it also has a fairy-tale story that’s good enough to get you onto its wavelength.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), the amusingly ironic hero of “Paint” (ironic because, as we discover, he’s about as far from heroic as you can get), hosts a one-man instructional painting show that gets broadcast live out of the PBS station in Burlington, Vermont. Each afternoon, Carl appears on camera for one hour, puffing on his pipe, holding his brushes and palette as he dashes off an oil painting of a local wilderness setting (snowy mountains, twilight vistas, trees), explaining all the while, in the unruffled monotone of a stoned hypnotist, how you too can get to a “special place” just by painting what’s in your heart. Carl himself seems nearly as much of an art object as his canvases of Mt. Mansfield, the Vermont peak he has begun to paint with OCD frequency. He wears the same denim Western shirts, fuzzy beard and ash-blond Afro that he’s been sporting since 1979. He’s a relic: the landscape painter as Fred Rogers for adults, a kind of soft-rock guru from the age when men were Mellow. The biggest TV celebrity in Burlington, he thinks he’s on top of the world, but he’s about to come tumbling down.