If you love the Minions as much as I do, you'll be horrified to learn that yet another movie featuring the mischievous little yellow fellas (do Minions have genders?) hits theaters this week. Otherwise, a slow week in new releases, unless you count Backrooms: Everything Must Go, an expanded version of the film. However, I do have a review of John Early's Maddie's Secret and also finally caught up with Leviticus.
Special Screenings
Thursday, July 2
Zootopia 2 (2025)
Dickman Park
Snakes are… good? Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
David (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
A kid slays a giant. $8. Thursday, Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. Saturday-Sunday 10 a.m. More info here.
Pump up the Volume (1990)
Emagine WIllow Creek
Christian Slater takes on The Man. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Gummo (1997)
Grandview 1&2
Harmony Korine’s rural Ohio grotesquerie. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Dog Man (2025)
Marcus West End
Half man. Half dog. All cop. $3. 10:45 a.m. More info here.
The Warriors (1979)
Parkway Theater
Come dressed as your favorite Warrior. $9/$12. Costume contest at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (2025)
Riverview Theater
Return to the ever-expanding pandaverse. $2. 10:45 a.m. More info here.
Friday, July 3
Dog Man (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
Here it is again. $7. 11 a.m. More info here.
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Granada
A Taste the Movies event. The menu does not include frog. $169. 8 p.m. More info here.
A Tribe Called Love (2026)
Heights Theater
Star-crossed lovers in Somali Toronto. $15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway
Yell at bad movies! $18/$25. 8 p.m. More info here.
The Thing (1982)
Trylon
Experience the debut of the Trylon’s new 4K projector. $8. 7 & 9:15 p.m. Saturday 2:45, 5. 7:15, & 9:30 p.m. Sunday 12:30 & 2:45 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, July 4
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Alamo Drafthouse
Psst… if you plan on seeing David Lean’s desert epic this summer, the Heights is showing it in 70mm next weekend. $10.99. 12:30 p.m. More info here.
Jaws (1975)
Emagine Willow Creek
Crazy how Steven Spielberg kept making movies for another 50 years and this is still his best. Also Sunday & Wednesday. $11. 3:10 & 6:20 p.m. More info here.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Heights Theater
OK, but why is Billy Ray Cyrus in this? $13. 3:30 p.m. Sunday 3:45 p.m. Monday 4 p.m. Tuesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Uncle Sam (1996)
Main Cinema
He wants you! Presented by Midnight Mayhem. $11. 10:45 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, July 5
Once Upon a Time in China (1991)
Alamo Drafthouse
Peak Jet Li. $10.99. 3:45 p.m. More info here.
Citizen Kane (1941)
AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Please enjoy this reel of Orson Welles talk show interviews. Also Wednesday. Tickets, times, and more info here.
F1® on Apple TV Live in IMAX: British Race
AMC Southdale
Vroom. $30. 8:30 a.m. More info here.
Stand By Me (1986)
Grandview 1&2
Lord do boomers love romanticizing their childhoods. Also Thursday. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Showgirls (1995)
Heights Theater
Elizabeth Berkley puts the “hoe” in Verhoeven. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Paddington (2014)
Marcus West End
It’s no Paddington 2, but then again, what is? $3. Sunday & Tuesday 11 a.m. Monday & Thursday 11:30 p.m. Wednesday 11:45 p.m. More info here.
American Pie (1999)
Roxxy’s Cabaret
Patriotic! Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Vanishing Point (1971)
Trylon
Nothing like a good old-fashioned ’70s car movie. $8. 5 & 7 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, July 6
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
AMC Southdale 16
Essential viewing for dragon owners. $3. 11 a.m. & 2 p.m. More info here.
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
Edina Mann
Aw, just let them have their secrets. Also Wednesday. $4.53. 10 a.m. More info here.
Stand by Me (1986)
Edina Mann
In case you’d rather watch it in Edina. $12.12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Road Games (1981)
Emagine Willow Creek
Stacy Keach vs. Jamie Lee Curtis. $7. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, July 7
The Terminator (1984)
Alamo Drafthouse
I love the part where he says, “Oh, I’m coming back!” $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Lilo & Stitch (2025)
Painter Park
The “live action” version. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Dog Man (2025)
Riverview Theater
This movie is everywhere this summer. Through Thursday. $2. 10:45 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, July 8
Scarface (1983)
Alamo Drafthouse
Al Pacino, you’re no Paul Muni. $13.99. 7:45 p.m. More info here.
F1 (2025)
The Commons
Oh no, the outdoor movies are starting earlier already. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Secret Movie Night
Emagine Willow Creek
Chosen by a local notable. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
West Side Story (1961)
Heights Theater
Starring famed Latina Natalie Wood. Also Thursday. $19. 7 p.m. More info here.
Inception (2010)
Lagoon Cinema
All I remember about this movie is that there are dreams, and then dreams within dreams? $11. 4:15 p.m. More info here.
The Razor’s Edge (1985)
Main Cinema
An incredible coming-of-age story set during the Lebanese Civil War. $5-$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
I Want Your Sex (2026)
Trylon
The Minnesota premiere of the latest from Greg Araki. Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, July 9
Over the Edge (1979)
Emagine Willow Creek
Kurt Cobain said this Matt Dillon movie "pretty much defined my whole personality." $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Happy Gilmore (1996)
Hiawatha Golf Course Clubhouse
Apt setting. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Goodfellas (1990)
Parkway Theater
Never heard of it. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Riverview Theater
A castle that can walk? Now I’ve seen everything! $7. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Domino (2005)
Trylon
Is this Keira Knightley vehicle a lost classic? $8. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Alpha
An Indian action thriller.
Maddie's Secret
The best thing about John Early’s directorial debut is his own performance as Maddie Ralph, a sweetly obliging woman whose bulimia resurfaces when her online cooking videos unexpectedly go viral. That star turn—stylized yet credible—allows Early to execute a precisely calibrated balance of melodramatics and laughs. It’s a pointed contrast to the supporting characters: Maddie’s Secret serves us the sort of supporting actors you might expect from a hip comedy (Kate Berlant as a horny, obsessive lesbian, Conner O’ Malley as a sleazy food show producer, and so forth) while Kristen Johnson flaunts a virtuosic lack of subtlety as Maddie’s horrific mom. Maddie’s Secret occasionally feels like a tonal exercise, a challenge to see how thoroughly Early can sentimentalize bad taste without toppling into camp or kitsch, though that's no small feat. People with actual eating disorders should proceed with caution, of course, though I’m plenty curious what they make of all this. B+
Minions & Monsters
Will this never end?
Nagabandham: The Secret Treasure
An Indian adventure film.
Rao Bahadur
An Indian psychological drama.
Young Washington
You could make a good movie about George Washington’s early life. Angel Studios can't though.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Backrooms
More film-studenty than anyone impressed at director Kane Parsons’s tender age of 20 wants to let on, this unexpected budget horror hit is ambiguous enough for us all to project our own sense of entrapment on its unrelentingly yellow liminal space. Postmodern capital, the male psyche, miscellaneous trauma, the internet—whatever’s recursively hemming you in, we all feel lost within some labyrinth right now, and much credit to Parsons for tapping into that timely sensibility. But movies, pesky damn things, will have characters, and stories, and dialogue, and, well… Chiwetel Ejiofor (as an extremely divorced furniture store owner) and Renate Reinsve (as a therapist I personally would not recommend) do what they can with some leaden dialogue by Will Soodik, who does not have youth and inexperience as an excuse. Doesn’t help that Parsons ratchets up the drama whenever a bit of the ol’ flattened affect would accentuate the eeriness. Backrooms is an A minus haunted house padded out into a B minus movie, so let’s just say… B
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War - The Calamity
Disclosure Day
In this movie we believe aliens exist, empathy is strength, TV brings people together, truth wins out in the end, some kind of vague god-related thing—I’m sorry, but what are we doing here? Spielbergologists will no doubt thematically connect this latest, closest encounter with the extraterrestrial to his past work in ways that are meaningful to them, but for this skeptical admirer it was two-plus hours of drab auteurist tics livened occasionally by technical feats no other living (or maybe dead) director could execute. Plotwise, former cybersecurity wiz Josh O’Connor has the proof of a government/corporate coverup, and he’s ready to tell the world. He’s somehow linked with Emily Blunt, a weather gal for a Kansas City TV station who’s gifted with mystical abilities by ETs. Both leads are swell, even if Blunt’s attempts at naïveté aren’t wholly convincing and O’Connor can’t always summon enough shades of earnest to avoid monotony, But Colin Firth and Coleman Domingo, as rival spymasters of sorts, find no pleasure in their roles, and Eve Hewson, as O’Connor’s girlfriend, a former novitiate, dispenses religious doubts with a sense of obligation that shortchanges both spirituality and science—and hell, fantasy as well. And then there’s the finale. Ultimately, your view of Disclosure Day may come down to whether you find Spielberg’s nostalgic faith in the transformative power of mass spectacle touching or deluded—or, let’s face it, self-aggrandizing. B-
The Furious
If you judge a martial arts movie by how many "remember that part where?"s come up in conversation afterwards (and what better measure is there?), Kenji Tanigaki’s ingenious and gory slugfest really racks 'em up. This review could easily degenerate into just a list of those moments if I didn’t want to give too much away, so let me just mention as a for instance the scene where one attacker has a knife at the throat of our hero—who’s resting on the back of another guy who has a knife at the throat over our other hero. The plot, for better or for worse, concerns a mysterious, mute handyman (Xie Miao) and an investigative journalist (Joe Taslim) whose daughter (a spunky Yang Enyou, who gives as good as she gets) and wife (Jeeja Yanin), respectively, are kidnapped by child traffickers with connections to the upper echelons of society. Up to the rescue of the imprisoned tykes, Tanigaki serves up some inventive mayhem, but The Furious earns its name with the finale, which revs into fifth gear as the two good guys face off against three baddies (and I promise you won’t be able to guess which). Here’s the kind of fight choreography that makes you wonder why we settle for such flat, rote combat in so many action flicks. I mean, the damage that these gentlemen can do with their legs alone is astonishing. A-
I Love Boosters
Every time I see a movie with Keke Palmer or LaKeith Stanfield in it, I think about how much of our time directors waste by making movies without Keke Palmer or LaKeith Stanfield in them. In Boots Riley’s Seussian celebration of art, communism, and Oakland, Palmer’s Corvette is part of a crew of high-end shoplifters, along with Naomi Ackie’s Sade and Taylour Paige’s Mariah, who draw the ire of girlboss designer Christy Smith (Demi Moore). Aided by Poppy Liu as a Chinese factory worker, Eiza González as a dirtbag leftist, and a device powered by dialectical materialism, they struggle to forge a global, multi-racial, working-class alliance. The film’s design team, led by Everything Everywhere All at Once costumer/Tierra Whack collaborator Shirley Kuratais, is playing a game no one else even knows the rules of, and the whole shebang is funny as hell. Of course, if you slow down and try to puzzle it all out… wait, why are you doing that? If I have a better time at the movies this year, I’ll be a very lucky man indeed. As for Stanfield—I’m not gonna give it away, but he’s in this. Damn is he in this. A
Leviticus
A small Australian town dominated by a fundamentalist sect has found a monstrous way to rid itself of gay teens: Following a creepy ritual, a demonic being in the image of the person you most desire appears and murders you. Writer/director Adrian Chiarella ratchets a good deal of tension from this scenario. Teens Naim and Ryan (Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen), already navigating the non-supernatural push and pull of a furtive, budding relationship, now have to wonder if the being who looks like their lover is actually a murderous entity. Both leads are compelling, but the mood is less scary than glum. As is the fashion with horror movies these days, Leviticus doesn’t give a shape to sublimated fears but instead literalizes terrors we’re already conscious of. “What if ‘conversion therapy’ psychologically tortured and killed kids?” isn’t a hypothetical, after all—it does just that. B-
Michael
This is the story of a sweetly eccentric young fellow who merely wants to collect exotic animals, visit children in hospitals, and share his incredible talents with the world. With the help of agent (and, incidentally, the film’s executive producer) John Branca (Miles Teller), our hero wriggles free of his abusive, domineering father (Colman Domingo) and embarks on his first solo tour in 1988, finally his own man—presumably it was all smooth sailing from there. A glitzy extended ad for the disgraced superstar’s estate, Michael follows in the footsteps of the modern music biopic not only as a form of brand management, but as a means of score-settling—from NWA to Elton John, every star wants to be a victim nowadays. Michael has a made-to-order villain in Jackson paterfamilias Joseph, but with his grotesque prosthetics and Nixonian hunched shoulders, Domingo is actually more cartoonish than Mike Myers is in his brief borscht-belt turn as CBS head Walter Yetnikoff. The lesson of Michael Jackson’s life is that the further you retreat into escapist fantasy the more inescapably your neuroses surface, and that plays out with his fandom: The more irreparably Jackson’s reputation is tarnished, the more his worshippers demand a portrait of a saint’s life. And so they get as lousy a movie as they deserve. Shout out to Janet Jackson, who refused to participate and therefore simply doesn’t exist in this Michaelverse. C
Obsession
I’ll say this for the “must see” horror flick of the summer—you should probably see it. Which is more than I say about most of the lukewarm bloodbaths (some of them not even Oz Perkins’s fault) that are regularly touted as the best thing to happen to the screen since the chainsaw. Michael Johnston’s Bear is so hapless he can’t acknowledge his crush on pal/co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) even when she asks him about it point blank. So, like so many doomed losers before him, he makes a magical wish for her love, an overturning of the natural order that goes wrong is ways both predictable and un-. Like any effective horror movie, there are all sorts of psychosexual subtexts you can tease out of this scenario—the (male) anxiety that true love is smothering, the (again male) desire to efface female personality—but though YouTube-weaned auteur Curry Barker has a genre-adept’s knack for pacing and execution, Obsession doesn’t have much conceptual play. But it also doesn’t give us the easy “slay girl” catharsis of, say, Companion, and what truly sets it apart is Navarrette’s committed performance of a woman trapped in a man’s fantasy. B+
Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu
Unidentified—ends July 2
