All right, we're gettin' to the good stuff finally. Of the four films I reviewed below this week—Frankenstein, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, The Mastermind, and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere—I recommend two wholeheartedly.
Special Screenings
Thursday, October 30
The Safe House (2025)
Alliance Française
Secrets are revealed when a family hides out from the events in Paris in May 1968. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Edina Mann/Marcus West End
Awoooo! $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
Triumph Over Evil: Battle of the Exorcists (2025)
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
A new “docu-drama” about how the devil is real. Or something. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
Depeche Mode: M (2025)
AMC Southdale 16
A concert film, in IMAX. $21.81. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
When I Saw You (2012)
Bryant Lake Bowl
An 11-year-old Palestinian’s life changes when he encounters some rebels. $10. 2 p.m. More info here.
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Emagine Willow Creek
I forgot this movie even happened. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Ratatouille (2007)
Granada
With a meal we can only assume is authentically prepared by a rat. Sold out. 6 p.m. More info here.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Edina Mann/Grandview 1&2
Can't say you haven't had a chance to see it this year. Also Friday. $17.61. Edina: 7 p.m. More info here. Grandview: 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Shining (1980)
Heights Theater
Never marry a writer. Sold out. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Never Alone (2025)
JCC Capp Center
A film about the fate of Jewish refugees in Finland during WWII. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 1 p.m. More info here.
Torah Tropical (2024)
JCC Capp Center
A documentary about a family in Colombia that converts to Orthodox Judaism. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 4 p.m. More info here.
Rabbi Capoeira (2025)
JCC Sabes Center
A capoeira champ brings Brazilian martial arts to Israel’s largest ultra-Orthodox city. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Halloween (1978)
Marcus West End
Often imitated, never duplicated. $10.50. 5 p.m. Sunday 10 p.m. More info here.
Hausu (1977)
Trylon
‘Tis the damn season. $8. Thursday-Saturday, Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. Sunday 3, 5, & 7 p.m. More info here.
Dracula (2025)
Walker Art Center
The latest from Raul Jude, the Romanian provocateur behind the brilliant Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, chronicles the making of a slapdash Dracula movie. Also Friday. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, October 31
The Goonies (1985)
Alamo Drafthouse
Hey, it’s that movie from your childhood again. $10.99. 12 p.m. Sunday 4 p.m. More info here.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Edina Mann/Marcus West End
Oh, I guess we’re doing ’em all? $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
Of Golems and Ghouls
JCC Sabes Center
A selection of short horror films. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 4 p.m. More info here.
Halloween (1978)
Parkway Theater
Can’t think of a better day to see it. $9/$12. 8 p.m. More info here.
Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Riverview Theater
Will you people keep it down? I’m trying to watch the movie. $7. 9 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, October 25
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
Alamo Drafthouse
He was a biker before it was cool. $7. 12:30 p.m. Tuesday 3:45 p.m. More info here.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 (2011)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Edina Mann/Marcus West End
Yep. we’re doing ’em all. $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
The City (2024)
JCC Capp Center
The hit Israeli musical. Preceded by The Combination, a short film about the Jewish gangster Kid Cann. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Main Cinema
They’re so quiet! Part of Midnight Mayhem. $11. 10 p.m. More info here.
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Parkway Theater
Featuring all your kids' favorite stars: Charles Durning, Edgar Bergen, and, of course, Orson Welles. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, October 26
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2 (2012)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Edina Mann/Marcus West End
They named the kid Renesmee. $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
Oracles of God: The Story of the New Testament (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/Marcus West End
I suspect there might be more accurate sources about biblical hermeneutics than Fathom Entertainment. Through Tuesday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Grandview 1&2
Hands down the most entertaining "gritty New York City" movie of the '70s, and that's sayin' a lot. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Heights Theater
Weird that all the old people sleep in one bed. $15. 1 p.m. More info here.
Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2025)
Open Book
Documentary about the comic artist. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 11 a.m. More info here.
Ada My Mother the Architect (2025)
Open Book
Filmmaker Yael Melamede documents the life of her successful mother. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 2 p.m. More info here.
The Zigzag Kid (2012)
JCC Capp Center
An adaptation of David Grossman’s story about an imaginative Israeli teen. Followed by art activities for kids. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 11 a.m. More info here.
Tatami (2025)
JCC Sabes Center
A female judo fighter from Iran is ordered to fake an injury so she won’t fight an Israeli competitor. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 1 p.m. More info here.
Milkweed (2025)
JCC Sabes Center
Billed as “the first feature-length animation ever created in Minnesota.” Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $16. 2 p.m. More info here.
Mazel Tov (2025)
Parkway Theater
The closing film of the 2025 Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival, followed by a live set by the Charles Gorczynski Tango Quartet. $25. 6 p.m. More info here.
CatVideoFest
Riverview Theater
It’s the weekend, and that means cat videos at the Riverview. $5. 10:45 a.m. More info here.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Roxy’s Cabaret
Technically still Halloween weekend. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Monday, November 3
The Return of Godzilla (1984)
Alamo Drafthouse
I didn’t know he went away. $13.99. 7 p.m. More info here.
Annie Hall (1977)
Edina Mann
Yeah, yeah, I know. But Diane Keaton! Also Wednesday. $12.15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Murderock (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
Murders rip through a dance academy. $8.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Heights Theater
If you wanna plan ahead, they’re showing it again next Tuesday. Sold out. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, November 4
Ringu (1998)
Alamo Drafthouse
A biopic about everyone’s favorite Beatle. $10.99. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Major League (1989)
Parkway Theater
Sports movie month kicks off at the Parkway. Hm, I guess “kicks off” is the wrong word here. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, November 5
Rocky IV: Rocky vs Drago – The Ultimate Director’s Cut (1985)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Not sure that the edit was the only problem with this movie. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
Don’t even bother to ask. It’s … Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Anniversary
A "dystopian political thriller" starring Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler.
Back to the Future (1985)
If you made this today, Marty would be traveling back to the '90s.
Bahubali: The Epic
An Indian historical drama.
Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone continue to do weird things together.
G-Dragon in Cinema: Ubermensch
Catch the South Korean rapper in concert.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
If I wanted to be cute I’d call Mary Bronstein’s frenzied If I Had Legs I’d Kick You the Uncut Gems of motherhood. But where Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner thrives on chaos, Rose Byrne plays a woman here who, unable to control the tumult of her life, strives desperately to escape it. With her husband (Christian Slater) away at work for two months, Byrne’s Linda, a therapist, is left to care for her child (Delaney Quinn) who has an eating disorder, a feeding tube, and typical childly needs. A colossal hole floods Linda’s apartment, sending her and the kid to a nearby motel as she juggles some sort of transference issues with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), the demands of a needy patient (Danielle Macdonald) with a newborn child, and the unwanted friendly gestures of a motel neighbor (A$AP Rocky). Bronstein presents the impossible demands of motherhood as a Matryoshka doll of failure, with Linda feeling guilty for feeling guilty about feeling guilty about her guilt, and Byrne bravely burrows into the harrowing, hilarious core of her role. (It’s not easy to make Byrne look unattractive, but the extreme closeups and garish lighting do their best.) This is anxiety as it’s actually lived, where every input is re-interpreted as a threat and every inconvenience is a catastrophe and objecting that “It isn’t supposed to be like this” doesn’t help a damn bit. A-
Kantara: A Legend—Chapter 1
An Indian mythological epic action film.
Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater's tribute to French cinema.
Kpop Demon Hunters: A Sing-Along Event
Probably best to catch this one at the theater that has a bar mommy and daddy can escape to.
Self-Help
A woman tries to save her mom from an evil support group.
Stitch Head
Let's not resort to name-calling.
Twilight
Back in theaters, for some reason.
Vincent Must Die
The French black comic horror film is playing as part of a double feature with the psychological thriller Hallow Road.
The Wrecker
An ex-Marine defends his family from the mob.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
After the Hunt—ends Thursday
In the worst movie of his career so far, Luca Guadagnino dares to ask the pressing question, “What if safe space #MeToo Gen Z sexual abuse trigger warning woke campus pronouns?” Guided by a screenplay from Nora Garrett that mistakes second-guessing for ambiguity, Guadagnino follows the cues of our national media in assuming that the surest way to understand the world is to plunge into the insufferable lives of tiresome people at an Ivy League school. Julia Roberts is Alma Imhoff, an ice queen philosophy prof at Yale married understandingly if not happily to a pompous shrink (Michael Stuhlbarg, Stuhlbarging all over the place) while playing will they/won’t they (or did they/didn’t they) with an everybody-loves-me colleague (Andrew Garfield, who seems to have forgotten to fill his Ritalin prescription). After Ayo Edebiri (who really shouldn’t let herself become typecast as The Young Person in movies like this) claims Garfield “crossed a line” with her, secrets from the past are exhumed, jobs are lost, generational cliches are bandied about, the Smiths are saved from #cancelculture, and Chloë Sevigny, as a ’90s-styled lesbian academic, pops in essentially as a sight gag. These characters’ motives aren’t just mysterious; they’re inscrutable, contradictory, and uninteresting. And while Roberts does what she can, finally I was left muttering “Professor Imhoff, I served with Lydia Tár, Lydia Tár was a friend of mine…” C
The Bad Guys 2—ends Thursday
Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle—ends Thursday
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
Eleanor the Great—ends Friday
Falcon Express—ends Thursday
Frankenstein
Frankenstein
That’s Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, if you must. As opposed to “Mary Shelley’s,” I suppose, though to be fair del Toro approximates the original novel more faithfully than most adaptations. In spirit, at least—he takes liberties with the story, most cleverly in making it so the Creature (Jacob Elordi) can never die. But he also ladles on an excess of motivational cues. F’rinstance, Victor Frankenstein’s father, the old Baron (Charles Dance), beats his son, which is why the doctor rejects the Creature so violently, you see, Frankenstein also juices up the conflict between Victor and Creature with several layers of jealousy: Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, Victor’s fiance in the book, is here engaged to his brother William, and, as del Toro heroines will, she falls for the Creature. And while the addition of Christoph Waltz as VIctor’s angel investor Heinrich Harlander is, I suppose, meant to highlight that our latter day mad scientists are funded by even madder financiers, his is one subplot too many. While Frankenstein has a vivid pop goth sheen, it lacks any real poetry or madness; humanist softie that he is, Del Toro even arranges a final reconciliation between the maker and his creation. And though it’s fun as hell to watch the Creature wreck shit, flinging people about with Hulk-like ferocity, his look is kinda wanting: He’s just a big, stitched together guy, kind of a jacked, overgrown Gollum. B
Grow—ends Thursday
Last Days—ends Thursday
The Mastermind
Let’s clear one thing up: This is a Kelly Reichardt heist movie, not a Kelly Reichardt heist movie. If you’re here for thrills ‘n’ quips ‘n’ plot twists, you’re gonna be really puzzled about why you’re spending so much time watching Josh O’Connor wander around his house in a v-neck sweater and boxers trying to figure out where to stash some stolen paintings. (I start with this disclaimer only because Reichardt has a unique gift for getting her movies out in front of people who hate them—this was chosen as AMC’s “Screen Unseen” mystery movie this month, can you even imagine?) This 1970 period piece is a character study of a guy with no character, marked by the contrast between its leisurely pacing and Rob Mazurek’s obtrusively jazzy score, the way the camera practically lusts after those huge Nixon-era cars, and the simple joy of watching a dope methodically ruin his life in slow motion. Lots of actors know how to be charming. Some even know how to fail at being charming. But not many know how to not realize they’re failing at being charming as brilliantly as O’Connor, maybe the only male actor today who could have gotten work in ’70s Hollywood. And if the idealism of the ’60s curdling into the narcissism of the ’70s is a pretty shopworn theme, Reichardt finds new resonance in relating it to our own age, and her ironic “womp womp” of a kicker is no cheaper than O’Connor’s dope deserves. A-
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s universally lauded tragicomic revolutionary epic has a lot on its thematic plate. It’s a movie about rescuing your daughter that’s really about how you can’t protect your kids, about the contrast between the glamour of doomed revolutionary action and the quiet victories of everyday resistance, about a parallel United States that mirrors our police state already in progress. And to white folks (like me and maybe you and probably PTA himself) who just wonder when all this will all be over in the real world, Anderson offers his most self-explanatory movie title since There Will Be Blood. But aside from all that One Battle After Another is just plain engaging and immersive and entertaining the way too many movies that make much more money only pretend to be. As in Killers of the Flower Moon, Leonard DiCaprio is a dopey white guy outclassed by a woman of another race (glad he’s found his niche); his greasy top-knot and Arthur Dent bathrobe will be the stuff of hipster Halloween costumes. Teyana Taylor is iconic in the true sense of the word as insatiable revolutionary Perfida Beverly Hills. (I told you all to see A Thousand and One, but did you listen?) Supremely unruffled as a Latino karate instructor, Benicio Del Toro is the calm center of the film’s most remarkable sequence. As the spirited abductee, Chase Infiniti (who somehow was not herself named by Thomas Pynchon) slowly accrues an echo of Taylor’s screen intensity. And I regret to report that Sean Penn is as brilliant here as everyone says. His Steven Lockjaw is a swollen testicle of a man, incapable of properly fitting into any suit of clothes, a walking study of the psychosis of authoritarianism. Oh yeah, and that climactic car chase is totally boss. A
Roofman
Probably not a good movie, and certainly not an honest one, Roofman is as desperate to be liked as its main character, serial McDonald's robber and escaped convict Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum). After ingeniously smuggling himself out of the clink, Manchester hides out in a Toys "R" Us and inconveniently falls for a store employee because she’s played by Kirsten Dunst. He follows her to church (calling himself John Zorn, heh heh), wins over her daughters and fellow churchgoers, and creates a new life for himself that can’t possibly last. And you know what, gosh darn it? I did like Roofman in spite of my (spiteful) self. Because Tatum is charming, especially when he’s playing with kids or flirting with Dunst, who is infallibly wonderful. Because the movie is relatively free of condescension to ordinary folks who find community at church and because it assumes that there’s a cineplex audience out there willing to root (with reservations) for a guy who robs fast food chains and big box stores. Let’s not go crazy here, though. Though relatively effective, the handheld camera is an affectation, a sign that director Derek Cianfrance wants Roofman to be a more credible movie than it is. But Tatum doesn’t have what it takes to truly plumb the pathological side of Manchester’s need to be loved. Still, if you’re in the mood for a crowd-pleaser turned tear-jerker or just want to see a liberal amount of Tatum’s bare ass, happy holidays. B
Shelby Oaks
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Bruce sure knows how to sabotage synergy, don’t he? The Boss released the long craved “Electric Sessions” of his lo-fi acoustic classic Nebraska (as part of a pricey box set) just in time for fans to watch Jeremy Allen White’s onscreen Springsteen complain about how those versions suck. And the artist was right to stand his ground against the big, bad money men at Columbia and insist that they release the haunted tapes he’d four-tracked on a TEAC 144 at his Colts Neck crash pad. Still, watching a guy write in a notebook and sing in his bedroom isn’t particularly cinematic. And you know what’s even harder to dramatize? The depression that Springsteen slipped into during this period, which writer/director Scott Cooper tries to explain via black and white flashbacks to a childhood dominated by an emotionally distant, physically abusive dad (Stephen Graham, doing his best as a psychological bogeyman). Jeremy Allen White, whose alleged charisma remains imperceptible to me, mostly plays Bruce as a sullen non-entity, and though he’s got the hunched shoulders and stretched, stiff neck down pat, half of the white guys in Jersey look more like the Boss than Allen does. But the big problem is that Cooper can’t match the eloquence with which Bruce Springsteen has written, sung, and spoken about his relationship with his father. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere may be as earnest as its subject, yet it's telling that a movie about a guy demanding that an album cover not even feature his photo lets someone prefix “Springsteen” to its title to make the film more marketable. C+
