‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Review: A Bedazzling Sequel, and the Rare Comic-Book Movie That Earns Its Convolutions

Italian artist Marco Perego’s debut feature The Absence of Eden has set a picturesque world premiere at the upcoming edition of Italy’s 69th Taormina Film Festival, running from June 23 to July 1.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Superhero fatigue” is a phrase that tends to make devoted movie lovers swoon with rapture. If you’re someone who cares about movies, who cares about cinema, the very prospect of superhero fatigue inspires you to think: Yes! There’s hope! People will get tired of this shit! But let’s be honest — that’s probably wishful thinking. In the last 20 years, led by Marvel but by no means limited to Marvel, comic book movies have infiltrated our culture and our consciousness to the point that they’re now part of who we are. If you ask any number of people, especially dudes of a certain generation, to name their favorite film, they will look at you and say “Star Wars,” often with a smirk that’s really saying, “’Star Wars,’ of course!” These aren’t just “Star Wars” fans. They’re “Star Wars” fundamentalists, who built the seedbeds of their imaginations on the original trilogy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Blackening” is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere. The set-up, which feels like a “Friday the 13th” sequel by way of “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” reunites nine old college chums to celebrate Juneteenth weekend in a big roomy house they’ve rented near the woods. (Yes, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods movie, but “cabin” doesn’t describe this place.) As Tina Turner’s cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” spins on the turntable, the first two to arrive, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), find their way to the basement game room, which has shelves of old board games, an ancient TV set, a Ouija board, and a prominently displayed game called The Blackening. Taking the box cover off, they discover, to their horror, that there’s a plastic Sambo head in the middle of the board, which asks questions like “What’s the first Black character to survive a horror movie?” For a few minutes, we’re in the terrain of “Scream” by way of “Get Out.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When you see a documentary about a game-changing pop star, you assume you’re going to get the story of the music, and also a good look at the life, and that there’ll be enough (on both counts) to go around. I was eager to see “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary portrait of Cyndi Lauper, because it’s directed by Alison Ellwood, who made “The Go-Go’s” a few years back, and that movie had everything: the drama, the trauma, the saga of a total pop-music reset, as we watched the Go-Go’s bust down doors that had been too tightly shut for too long. Cyndi Lauper was no less revolutionary a figure, arriving in the early ’80s, along with Madonna, to announce that we were in the midst of a seismic new definition of what it meant to be a female pop star. The definition was: a star who could rule — and change — the world.

J. Kim Murphy Robert Gottlieb, an editor extraordinaire who worked with writers as varied as Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro and Bill Clinton, died Wednesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92. Gottlieb’s death was confirmed to the New York Times by his wife, actor Maria Tucci. Working at publishers Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, Gottlieb’s impressive record of shepherding manuscripts into well-regarded, sometimes bestselling and award-winning works earned him a towering reputation among literary elite. John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok and Ray Bradbury were among his clients, along with Katharine Graham, the once publisher of the Washington Post.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bucky F*cking Dent,” the second movie written and directed by David Duchovny (the first was “House of D,” in 2004), is based on a novel by Duchovny that was published in 2016, and whether or not the story is autobiographical, it feels autobiographical, and I mean that as a compliment. Set in the summer of 1978, it’s framed around one man’s obsession with the Boston Red Sox — meaning, of course, the curse of the Bambino, going back to 1918, the last time (until 2004) the Sox won the championship. The man is Ted Fulilove, which is a terrible last name for a movie character, though he’s played by Duchovny as a cussed crab apple with an amusing misanthropic put-down for every occasion (like: “Closure’s for morons”). “Bucky F*cking Dent” has a handful of characters, but it’s essentially a father-son two-hander — one of those dramadies in which the dad is a heartless-on-the-surface coot who was no good when it came to how he treated his family, and the son is a lot nicer and more sensitive, but maybe too sensitive (as a correction to all that paternal dickishness). Which also means that he’s lost.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s one of the inside-out realities of our era that scandal, if you give it enough time, turns into myth. So it is with the story of Milli Vanilli, the German-French R&B pop duo of the late ’80s and early ’90s who, having sold close to 50 million records, were revealed to be a fake: a pair of lip-syncing Euro pretty boys who hadn’t sung a note on any of their hits or at any of their concerts. Once they’d been unmasked, the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli played out on two levels. The first was the spectacular embarrassing bad joke of it all — though it was never just a joke, since Milli Vanilli’s fans felt a tremendous sense of anger and betrayal at having been fooled. (The joke was on them.) The second level recognized a crucial and obvious truth: that the scandal wasn’t only about Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, with their teenybop dreads and break-lite dance moves, getting up onstage and singing to prerecorded tracks, as if it had all been their idea. No, the brazen fakery of Milli Vanilli echoed, or at least rhymed with, various other kinds of fakery that were embedded in the music industry (the packaging of boy bands, the use of lip-syncing by established stars). This was certainly more extreme, and worthy of being called on the carpet for, but it wasn’t a stand-alone sin.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Jason Isbell has a new album out, “Weathervanes,” and he says, “I’m happy to be talking about it. You know, I’ve been talking about a lot of other stuff lately, and it’s nice to actually discuss the job that I chose for myself.” Nothing against the Other Stuff on his part, mind you. He’s proud of the much-heralded HBO Max documentary that director Sam Jones made about him, “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed,” even if it did open him and his wife, Amanda Shires, up to a huge amount amount of personal scrutiny. And he’ll sure be spending an even bigger part of the year than he is now talking about his dramatic role in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which he now feels confident did not leave him in the position of “be(ing) the one guy that screws up this $200 million movie.”

“The Flash.” Before “Dungeons & Dragons” they co-wrote “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and directed 2018’s “Game Night.”Reynolds recently appeared in Apple’s Christmas musical “Ghosted” and has “Deadpool 3” and John Krasinski’s high-concept fantasy “IF” in the works (both for 2024).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In comic-book movies, when it comes to a hero’s superpowers — flying, lifting objects, repelling bullets, the indomitability of a shield or hammer — the audience is almost always on the outside looking in. But in “The Flash,” when the title character throttles forward at the speed of the hot-singe lightning streaks at his back, or floats through the air in slowed-down motion so beyond bullet-time that a mere second appears to last forever, the movie makes us part of the experience. We know just what he’s going through, which is why the scene gives you a jolt.     Early on, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), a forensic chemist in the Central City Police Department, receives a call from Alfred (Jeremy Irons) — yes, that Alfred — letting him know that there’s an attack underway, and that none of the other Justice League members, notably Batman, is around to help. So Barry, in his form-fitting red thermal crystal helmet and suit, zoom-runs all the way to Gotham City, where he confronts a high-rise hospital whose east wing is collapsing, leaving a nursery full of newborns falling through the air. The extended sequence in which he saves them, grabbing energy bites of candy and burrito in between, has the feel of an underwater comedy ballet. It’s life-or-death but cheeky as hell. Just like our cracked hero.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The early “Transformers” films — in fact, just about all the “Transformers” films — were two things at once. They were industrial showroom expos of chop-shop magicianship, with cars and trucks and motorcycles turning themselves inside out, their guts flipping as if a trash compactor had exploded into bits and pieces, only to reassemble themselves into towering robots. The spectacle of those gigantic shape-shifting droids is something that I, more than a lot of critics, always found to be fun. But, of course, the “Transformers” movies were also unrestrained pileups of sheer Michael Bay-ness — kiddie diversion on processed steroids. The plots sprawled all over the place yet somehow never mattered; the films went on way too long; the endless clashing titans made you yearn for the human nuance of a “Godzilla” movie.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’ve ever wondered when it was that Michel Gondry, the gifted French director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” became the world’s most annoying filmmaker, you might say the answer is, “He always was.” Yet no one, including me, quite thinks of him that way. That’s because the few works of his that have come to prominence possess a special combination of facility and charm. I adore “Eternal Sunshine,” a virtuoso movie that bends your brain and breaks your heart at the same time. You might simply choose to characterize it as the masterpiece of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, but the truth is that Gondry directed it ­— the leaps in time, the emotionally convulsive performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet — with a masterful sense of play and gravitational control.

Jordan Moreau What’s up, danger? After nearly five years, it’s time to swing back into the Spider-Verse, as Sony’s sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” has webbed up $17.35 million in Thursday previews at the box office. The animated sequel is expected to open at $80 million this weekend, with some projections going as high as $90 million or more. It’s a big swing ahead of the original movie, 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which opened with $35.4 million and had $3.5 million in Thursday previews. The Thursday total also gives “Across the Spider-Verse” the second-highest preview gross for an animated movie, behind “The Incredibles 2” with $18.5 million, and the second-highest previews for any “Spider-Man” film, behind “Spider-Man: No Way Home” with $50 million.

her partner, Scottish globetrotter David Ward, as the British Abercrombie & Fitch model followed behind.However, sources told The Post that the pair are not dating and that Gill is romantically linked with one of Leo’s close friends — and has been for months.The Post has contacted representatives for DiCaprio and Gill for comment. DiCaprio, 48, and Gill, 28, previously partied at the Chiltern Firehouse back in February.

With "Yellowstone" and its spinoffs dominating the small screen and Martin Scorsese’s "Killers of the Flower Moon" earning rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, the Western genre is alive and well in entertainment. "Reports of the Western’s death are always greatly exaggerated," Andrew Nelson, film historian and chair of the Department of Film & Media Arts at the University of Utah, told Fox News Digital.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Most artists, if they’re lucky, invent one thing. But Kenneth Anger, who was a filmmaker, an author, a debauched aristocratic scenester and, to the day of his death at 96 (he reportedly died May 11, though it wasn’t made public until May 24), a figure of puckish mystery, invented several things, each of them epic. In “Fireworks,” his transcendent 14-minute avant-garde film of 1947, Anger invented the very consciousness and imagery of gay liberation — not the desire to be liberated (which was buried in the hearts of gay people everywhere), but the rapturous visual reverie of what that liberation might look like, what it would feel like, why it seemed so forbidden, and why it needed to be. In “Scorpio Rising,” his homoerotic demon-biker/Top-40-orgy blast from the underground, Anger invented MTV, invented what Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets” and David Lynch did in “Blue Velvet,” invented a way to express how music and reality talk to each other.

Marta Balaga Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has scored a Fipresci award in Cannes.  The jury of the International Federation of Film Critics praised the film “for its formal radicality, the complexity of the sound and score, and its contrast between the invisible atrocities behind the wall and a supposed paradise,” Fipresci stated on Saturday.  “By presenting the horror as something usual, and using everyday-like dialogues, it’s a reflection on ignorance as a disease that connects the past with the present.” Glazer’s take on a Nazi family living next door to Auschwitz and enjoying it – loosely based on the novel by Martin Amis, who tragically passed away on May 19, just before the premiere – has been getting rave reviews at the French festival, becoming one of the frontrunners for this year’s Palme d’Or.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s RAI Cinema, which has four titles in this year’s Cannes selection, has closed a deal on Ron Howard’s next movie “Origin of Species,” a hot project at the Cannes market starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Ana de Armas, Jude Law and Alicia Vikander. RAI Cinema chief Paolo Del Brocco said the company – which is the film arm of Italian state broadcaster RAI – has teamed up with Rome-based Lucisano Media Group to acquire Italian rights from CAA Media Finance on Howard’s survival thriller penned by Noah Pink (“Tetris”) about a a group of eclectics who turn their backs on civilization and head to the Galapagos. In Cannes, RAI Cinema also picked up Italian rights from Gaumont on family movie “Moon The Panda,” by French humans and animals adventures specialist Gilles de Maistre, known for “Mia and the White Lion”and “The Wolf and the Lion.” De Maistre’s latest, about the friendship between a boy and a panda, is set to shoot later this month in China’s Sichuan mountains.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer The upper deck at France’s Hotel Du-Cap-Eden-Roc offers a stunning coastal view of nearby city Cannes, the kind that Jay Gatsby would covet to peep Daisy Buchanan. On Tuesday, at one of the hottest parties at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, that view belonged to Graydon Carter. Standing alone with a female companion, the creator of the digital publication Air Mail and iconic former editor of Vanity Fair observed not a long-lost love but a cliffside full of movie stars, auteur directors and Hollywood power players. Carter’s Air Mail co-hosted an evening celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Warner Bros. Pictures, the latter represented by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and his top content lieutenants. Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Lily-Rose Depp, Sam Levinson, Jason Statham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Rebel Wilson and more turned up to toast cinema and each other.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan cockeyed minimalist of Finland, has become the ultimate illustration of the principle that if you make movies in the same mood and style, with the same monosyllabic bombed-out hipster vibe, for a period of 30 years, your movies may not have changed — but the world around them has, so the films will have a totally different effect. In “Fallen Leaves,” the Kaurismäki bauble that’s showing at Cannes this year, there’s actually a scene in which a character uses a computer. The film’s heroine, Ansa (Alma Pöysti), loses her job as a supermarket worker, and to find another gig she rents an HP laptop at a makeshift Internet café that charges 10 Euro for half an hour. Apart from that, the movie unfolds in that scruffy and sparsely decorated so-familiar-it’s-cozy pre-tech Kaurismäki zone, where people still use electric adding machines or listen to a bulky kitchen radio that looks like it’s from the early ’60s. “Fallen Leaves” is set in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, but to our eyes it’s a weirdly underpopulated place where shopping, as a pastime, doesn’t exist, and neither, in any meaningful way, does conversation.