Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh are stepping out for the premiere of their new HBO series!
27.03.2024 - 03:27 / variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic For more than 40 years now, moviegoers have lined up to see the spectacle of people being slaughtered by a psycho with a chainsaw, a psycho in a Halloween mask, a psycho in a goalie mask, a psycho with burnt skin and a striped shirt and fedora, or a psycho with S&M nails in his face. So why not a psycho Winnie the Pooh? “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” raised a few hackles — otherwise known as free publicity — for having the scuzzy temerity to take a couple of beloved children’s characters and place them at the center of a slasher film. Yet the stunt concept was about all there was to it.
The movie, made on a budget of $50,000, was too logy and inept to be a real scandal, or any sort of theatrical sleeper hit. (It opened on 1,652 screens and wound up grossing a total of $1.7 million.) On paper, “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” sounded like an extreme TikTok video, yet it was amateurishly staged and badly paced, neither scary nor funny. A measure of how uninspired it was is that the movie never truly made good on its satirical hook and convinced you that you were seeing killer versions of the legendary characters created by A.A.
Milne. In essence, you were just watching a slasher in a rubbery Winnie the Pooh mask that didn’t even look like Pooh. (It looked more like Christopher Cross.) And yet, in its very existence, “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” announced a brave new world of where horror could go.
Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh are stepping out for the premiere of their new HBO series!
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Back to Black,” the 2006 album that the new Amy Winehouse biopic takes its title from, is a record built on an exquisite contradiction. The music has a crispy delicious retro-bop bounce, a quality that extends to Winehouse’s vocals, which take the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and kick them up into something playfully ferocious. Yet when you tune into the lyrics, they’re as dark as midnight.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The People’s Joker,” a scandalous IP-on-acid coming-out comic-book psychodrama, is a movie that has all the earmarks of an underground/ midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation. Vera Drew, who directed and co-wrote it, plays the title character, a mentally fractured aspiring stand-up comedian who bills herself as Joker the Harlequin.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” is a documentary about 4Chan, the popular imageboard website that became the Petri dish in which QAnon — the mother of all crackpot conspiracy theories — came into being. The story of 4Chan makes for a fascinating chapter in the evolution of Internet culture.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy” is the scariest film I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There had been drill sergeants in movies before Louis Gossett Jr. played one in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 (though for the life of me, I can’t remember any). There would be a lot of them afterwards.
One of the stars of The Crown believes the show should not be revived, and that the health battles of Kate Middleton and King Charles should not be brought to screen.
Brent Lang Executive Editor “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is looking mighty as it heads into its opening weekend, earning an impressive $10 million in Thursday previews. The muscular results come despite the fact that the film suffered meh reviews — critics faulted the latest clash of the primordial beasts for hectic pacing and overstuffed plotting. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, for instance, dismissed the film as “overly busy boilerplate” (though he liked the finale).
Hollyoaks fans were left 'shocked' as Nikki Sanderson revealed her age before her soap star beau paid a sweet tribute on her special day. The actress, currently playing Maxine Minniver in the Channel 4 soap, was celebrating her birthday this week when she stunned fans.
Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Magnolia Pictures has released a trailer ahead of the May 3 release of “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” about the legendary muse to the Rolling Stones. Scarlett Johansson provides the voice for Pallenberg, based on the words of her unpublished memoir.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Watching “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” I realized that the movie, a standard overly busy and mediocre blockbuster with a pretty awesome wow of a clash-of-the-titans climax, was demonstrating one of the essential principles of Hollywood movie culture today. Namely: All blockbuster movies are now connected! Kong, living in the Hollow Earth, where most of the film is set (the Hollow Earth is a place I’ve never much liked the idea of, since it seems like Earth’s version of a storage basement), is supposedly the last of his kind, but he discovers a child ape who actually looks like an homage to the cuddly creature in the 1967 Japanese film “Son of Godzilla.” This kid gorilla leads Kong to a tribe of scraggly hostile apes who are living in a slave society presided over by the Skar King, an evil ape with blotchy red hair who’s as tall as Kong and wields a skeletal bone whip that looks like it was fashioned out of the spine of a sea serpent.
Alex Ritman In news likely to simultaneously delight and appall across the cinema world, a third instalment of IP-bludgeoning slasher ‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’ has been confirmed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield and Scott Chambers of prolific horror banner Jagged Edge Productions. According to the producers, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 3’ will have a bigger budget than the previous films and will introduce new characters from the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories, including Rabbit, the heffalumps and the woozles. All will no doubt be given sadistic, murderous twists.
Love Island: All Stars finalists Georgia Steel and Toby Aromolaran have decided to call it quits on their relationship just one month after the final aired.
Carl Barât of The Libertines and Kyle Falconer of The View have shared details of a new “songwriting getaway” course, set to take place in Spain later this year.The two shared news of the new course on social media, posting the poster for a Songwriting Getaway hosted by the team at La Sierra Casa – a luxury songwriting camp based in Spain.Set to take place later this year, the 2024 edition is described as an “intensive writing and songwriting course”, presented by the View frontman and featuring Barât as “a very special guest”.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic At a glance, Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign for president was the definition of quixotic. She was 47 years old; at the time, she had served only one term (starting in 1968) as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. (Her district centered on the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.) To say that Chisholm wasn’t a seasoned Washington, D.C., player would be putting it mildly, and she looked the part of the outsider.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When two stars have “chemistry,” we tend to think of it as basic animal magnetism. And maybe that’s the essence of it. Yet when a romantic movie works, even a synthetic magical rom-com trifle like “Irish Wish,” what draws us into the chemistry isn’t simply the actors’ sexy connection.
EXCLUSIVE: Indonesian actress and singer Acha Septriasa and Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey actress Natasha Tosini have been set to star with actor-writer-director Carl Jackson film Arthur And Bree.
Liam Gallagher and John Squire kicked off their joint UK and Ireland headline tour last night (March 13) – check out footage and see the full setlist below.The former Oasis frontman and ex-Stone Roses guitarist played an 11-song set at the legendary Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, Scotland where they showcased their collaborative debut album in full.Additionally, the pair and their backing band treated the crowd to a cover of The Rolling Stones‘ classic 1968 single ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ to round off the evening.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Enter the Dragon,” starring Bruce Lee, is one of the four or five greatest action films ever made. Yet it has a thin, awkward, lurching story.
Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey star Natasha Tosini was pleased to learn that the movie won the Razzie Award for Worst Picture.The parody award show, which was designed to honour cinematic failures, crowned the Winnie The Pooh-inspired slasher the worst film of the year, beating nominees including Meg 2: The Trench and Shazam! Fury Of The Gods.Having taken place in Los Angeles on March 9, the awards contain categories similar to those used at the Oscars or BAFTAs, but acknowledging the worst entry rather than the best.However Tosini, who stars in a central role in Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, has said that the film’s winning of this category and four others, including Worst Director and Worst Screenplay, was a “great thing”.According to the Nottingham Post, the actor said: “We were up against people who had millions of pounds. The fact that we are in that list is amazing, I think it’s a great thing.”She added that the Razzie win is just growing the conversation around the movie.