I am undeniably pumped for Bleak Week at the Trylon: seven miserable classics for only the hardiest of spirits. For examples of some bad bleakness, however, please scroll down to read my reviews of Ballerina (sorry—From the World of John Wick: Ballerina) and The Phoenician Scheme.
Special Screenings
Friday, June 6
Clue (1985)
Riverview Theater
Late night movies are back for the summer. $5. 9 p.m. Friday-Saturday 10:45 p.m. More info here.
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway Theater
Sorry, screamers, this one is sold out. 8 p.m. More info here.
Rogue One (2016)
Trylon
It’s not like other Star Warses, it’s a cool Star Wars. $8. Friday-Saturday, Monday Tuesday 7 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5:45 p.m. More info here.
The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
Trylon
Start Bleak Week off right—with a busload of kids dying. $8. 9:30 p.m. More info here.
High Fidelity (2000)
Uptown Theater
Movies are back at the Uptown, and John Cusack will be there as well. $92-$280. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
The Garfield Movie (2024)
Webber Park
Weird choice to make an animated biopic about the 20th President of the United States, but I’m intrigued. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, June 7
But I'm a Cheerleader (2000)
East Side Sculpture Park
A lesbian cheerleader?? What?? Free. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
UFC 316: Dvalishvili vs. O'Malley 2
Emagine Willow Creek
Fightin’! $26.60. 9 p.m. More info here.
Dinner in America (2020)
Grandview 1&2
On its way to becoming a cult hit, I'm told. $14.44. 4 p.m. Wednesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Forrest Gump (1994)
Lake Harriet Bandshell
A truly evil movie. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
The Craft (1996)
Main Cinema
Hot young witches cause trouble. $11. 10 p.m. More info here.
Come and See (1985)
Trylon
The Eastern Front of WWII? Not fun! $8. 1 p.m. Sunday 12 p.m. More info here.
Dogra Magra (1988)
Trylon
“A phantasmagorical descent into gloom and despondency,” you say? $8. 4 p.m. Tuesday 9:30 p.m. More info here.
Threads (1984)
Trylon
Britain does not keep calm and carry on after a nuclear attack. $8. 9:30 p.m. Sunday 8:30 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 8
Tangerine (2015)
Emagine Willow Creek
Just out of jail, a trans woman has A Day. $11.60. 2 p.m. More info here.
Twilight (2008)
Emagine Willow Creek
Let’s all listen to My Chemical Romance’s “Vampire Money.” Also Wednesday. $10.60. 3:15 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Happy Together (1997)
Grandview 1&2
Wong Kar-wai follows the path of fraught relationship between two men. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, June 9
The American Miracle: Our Nation is No Accident (2025)
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Typical Christian nationalist propaganda from Fathom Entertainment. Through Wednesday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here, if you must.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Emagine Willow Creek
Say what you want, but seven installments in nine years is pretty damn impressive, in a production line kinda way. $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Natural Enemies (1979)
Trylon
Hal Holbrook’s about to snap, y’all. $8. 9:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 10
Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)
Alamo Drafthouse
Alamo’s promo copy says this sequel is “miles better than it has any right being.” $11.95. 8:15 p.m. More info here.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
Alamo Drafthouse
The final Hunger Games movie. Except for all the others. $10. 6 p.m. More info here.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)
Bottineau Park
Please stop. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Good Boy (2024)
Main Cinema
A documentary about losing a pet, with a discussion between the filmmaker and Cathy Wurzer. $25. 1:30 & 7:30 p.m. More info here.
But I’m a Cheerleader (2000)
Parkway Theater
Twice this week? Must be June. $9/$12. Burlesque/drag hosted by Queenie von Curves at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 11
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening of the “live action” remake. $16.45. 6 p.m. More info here.
Bride of Chucky (1998)
Alamo Drafthouse
Hot doll on doll action. $10. 10 p.m. More info here.
Happy Together (1997)
Edina 4
In case you missed it Sunday. $14.44. 7 p.m. More info here.
Twilight (2008)
The Commons
If you’d prefer to watch it outside. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Secret Movie Night
Emagine Willow Creek
What could it be? $11.60. 7 p.m. More info here.
Mysterious Skin (2005)
Trylon
RIP Michelle Trachtenberg. $13. 7 p.m More info here.
Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Trylon
Junkie love on the rocks. $8. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Ballerina
The full official title is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, but it’s not my job to do PR for yet another IP extension that flails around for two hours in search of a reason for existing. I’ll admit, many of the action sequences (grenades! flamethrowers! kitchen utensils!) are more imaginative than I’d expect from director Len Wiseman, best known as Kate Beckinsale’s ex-husband and second-best known as the auteur behind the Underworld vampire movies, which were essentially an excuse to ensconce Beckinsale in latex. (I mean, there are worse ideas.) Once we’ve trudged through tiresome exposition and Ana de Armas’s vengeful death-machine Eve makes it to a quiet mountain village where everyone turns out to be a killer, Ballerina approaches something like fun. But this is just not the right vehicle for de Armas. Keanu Reeves’s glum zen stoicism perfectly anchored the mayhem around him in the other Wick movies, but who would watch de Armas’s brief, delightfully glam turn in No Time to Die and prefer to see her trudging through rehashed lore as a dour assassin? And yes, Keanu does appear in Ballerina—though I’m not sure anyone told him he did. B-
Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye
An anime adventure continues.
Dangerous Animals
A serial killer plans to feed a surfer to the sharks in this Australian thriller.
Dogma
Oh no you don't. We are not doing "Dogma was actually good."
I Don’t Understand You
A gay couple heads to Italy to adopt a baby.
The Phoenician Scheme
As a lukewarm Wes Anderson apologist, I take no joy in reporting that this chuckle-eliciting puzzle box is essentially the movie the dandy director’s haters accuse him of constantly remaking. Benicio del Toro is Zsa Zsa Korda, an apparently assassin-proof international power broker with a knack for wrangling slave labor and inciting famine. Following his latest near death encounter, Korda embarks on facilitating his final, most ambitious project, accompanied by his daughter and potential heir, a moonfaced and expressionless would-be novitiate named Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Thing is, all his backers want out, and he’s got to wrangle and manipulate a collection of terrific bit players (hearing Jeffery Wright recite Anderson/Coppola dialogue is always a pleasure) into ponying up the dough. Threapleton is a perfect match for Anderson’s schtick, and the zany final showdown between del Toro and a bewhiskered Benedict Cumberbatch should cap a much funnier movie. But a handful of pleasing moments don’t add up to much, and we get far more of Michael Cera’s dazed turtle expressions than anyone needs in 2025. B-
The Ritual
Why is Al Pacino doing an exorcism movie in 2025?
Thug Life
An Indian gangster movie.
Housefull 5 A
An Indian comedy thriller.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bring Her Back
There’s nothing like watching a feral child chomp down on a knife blade, shattering teeth within his bloody maw, to make you think, “You know, I don’t really want to watch a feral child chomp down on a knife blade, shattering teeth within his bloody maw.” I’m not saying that moment was the first time Bring Her Back made me flinch, or that Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers known collectively as Rackaracka, totally lost me with that gore. But it’s definitely when I no longer enjoyed flinching. With Talk to Me, the brothers updated urban legend for the TikTok era; here they turn to the “orphans move to a creepy new home” genre, with Sally Hawkins as Laura, an eccentric foster parent to spunky, partially sighted Cathy (Mischa Heywood) and her protective half-brother Andy (Billy Barratt). Laura’s daughter is dead, and ever since, her son (Jonah Wren Phillips) has been mute—nothing suspicious there. But she sure seems to be planning an elaborate ritual to resurrect the girl. There’s lots to admire here, from the performances to the orchestration of suspense. As a full-throttle assault on the audience, it's effective. But Bring Her Back wants to be both a portrait of maternal grief and a cineplex gross-out all at once, and you gotta be some kind of genius to square that circle. B
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Now this is how you juice up an aging franchise: Raise the stakes but stick to what works, acknowledge past entries without going all winky-winky meta or bogging down in lore. Bloodlines begins with an elaborate disaster scenario in which a young woman and her beau attend the opening night of a rotating restaurant atop a glittering new Sky Tower. Will that structure soon topple and crumble, slaying its occupants in myriad ingenious ways? Yes and no. Turns out the woman had a vision and saved everyone that night, and ever since Death has been eliminating the survivors, family by family. This movie is just a piñata of gruesome treats awaiting a firm whack. There’s an elaborately Final Destination-proofed home surrounded for some reason with dangerously sharpened poles. We have to wait impossibly long to learn how and if a glass shard will factor into a kill. And of course, the camera suggests that practically every item in every scene is a potential murder weapon. It’s all arranged with the kind of craft lacking in too many contemporary goremeisters, hacks and auteurs alike—a Final Destination does not allow for sloppiness. The characters are even reasonably sympathetic, though after each gets taken out you still gotta say, “OK, good one, Death.” If you wanted to assign Bloodlines a simple moral, it’d be that the more we try to keep our children safe, the more we estrange ourselves from them. Or, as Tony Todd puts it, returning one last time as Death-understander William Bludworth, “When you fuck with Death, things get messy.” A-
Friendship
Some comedy punches up. Some comedy punches down. Tim Robinson punches himself in the face. Though written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, this is essentially a 100-minute I Think You Should Leave skit, as both admirers and skeptics have agreed. So how long can an audience endure the presence of a character so one-dimensional that nobody else on screen can put up with him? About 100 minutes, I’d say. With his hawk nose and arsenal of unsettling stares, Robinson is a walking punchline; here he’s Craig Waterman, a marketing director with no apparent interests or skills. That changes when he meets his new neighbor, a dynamic TV weatherman named Austin (Paul Rudd), who invites Craig into his circle then understandably cuts the obsessive weirdo off. Now won over to the idea of doing things with other people, a jilted Craig tries to pattern his life after Austin, only to alienate his coworkers, poison himself, and endanger his wife—he’s kind of the mirror image of Nathan Fielder, but instead of carefully rehearsing how a person behaves to fit into social situations, Craig thinks he can skip the hard work and just skate by as a mimic. Friendship doesn’t so much satirize modern masculinity as satirize anyone who thinks they might have something to say about modern masculinity. And where most comics, no matter how abrasive, deep down want you to love them, Robinson never softens Craig or asks for sympathy. He’s committed to the bit. A-
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
A catchy little title for a quiet, pleasant rom-com that has less to do with Jane Austen than it lets on—and while we’re at it, Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) wrecks her life without any novelist’s help at all. Agathe is a French bookseller who unexpectedly lands a writers’ residency in England populated by the sort of dotty characters you’d expect to show up. Long single and celibate, she finds herself ensnared in a love triangle between her womanizing pal Félix (Pablo Pauly) and Oliver (Charlie Anson), a haughty Austen descendant. There’s a lot of froth about what literature means and how each of us must live and love fully that rings hollow in such a subdued movie. In the end Jane Austen isn’t all that’s missing here—there’s just not enough rom. And it could definitely use some more com as well. B-
Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning
How is it that the only prominent person in this dumb country suspicious of AI seems to be Tom Fuckin’ Cruise? The most consistent action franchise this side of John Wick wraps up (or does it?—you really think that peppy lil guy is about to retire?) with Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt fighting to prevent an all-powerful artificial intelligence called The Entity from starting a nuclear war. But The Final Reckoning is no more immune to bloat than any other blockbuster—you could lop a full half-hour of talking from this nearly three-hour adventure and no one would be the wiser. The script hunts for loose ends from previous installments just to tie them up, and the supporting cast is uneven—if Pom Klementieff has a truly fierce shooting-people face, Esai Morales remains a nonentity of a villain. By next month, you’ll remember The Final Reckoning as the MI where Tom hunts through a nuclear sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and climbs around on a biplane as the wind resistance does weirder things to his face than Vanilla Sky. Both incredible set pieces, worth the price of admission even. But you’ll probably forget most of the rest. I already have. B
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s Jim Crow vampire flick is a truly rare thing: a wholly self-assured mess. Technically and narratively, Coogler knows exactly what he wants to do, whether or not you can keep up, and each of the performers are just as committed. You get Michael B. Jordan distinguishing the murderous twins Smoke and Stack without resorting to caricature, Delroy Lindo as an aged bluesman. Hailee Steinfeld as a seductive quadroon, Jack O'Connell as an undead banjoist, Wunmi Mosaku as a wise hoodoo woman, Saul Williams as a preacher with a new wave hairdo, and I could just keep going. They all populate a vividly simulated Clarksdale, Mississippi to which Jordan’s gangsters have returned to open a juke joint soon targeted by bloodsuckers—you could call this August Wilson’s From Dusk to Dawn. There are visual moments that split the diff between cornball and visionary (I truly did not know Autumn Durald Arkapaw had this in her) and more ideas—about Black spirituality and its vexed relationship to Christianity, about the social role of music, about integration as a deal with the devil—than your average multiplex sees in a whole summer. And if Coogler never slows down to develop those ideas, they still pack a conceptual wallop that complements the film's lived-in texture. This world is so engrossing that by the time the vamps come calling, I almost wished Coogler would just let his people have their one night undisturbed. But America’s not really like that, is it? A-
