This is low-key a pretty great week for local rep theaters. Catch up on Kon Ichikawa or Wong Kar-wai or Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. Mourn David Lynch or Val Kilmer. Born Yesterday? The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? All good stuff.
Also this week, Public Functionary begins a three-weekend event called Open Screen: The Forum, a series of screenings and talks from "image-makers."
And down below, I've got reviews of two new movies for ya: the great Misericordia and the better-than-you-heard The Shrouds.
Special Screenings
Thursday, May 1
Real Genius (1985)
Emagine Willow Creek
RIP Val Kilmer. $11.50. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Born Yesterday (1950)
The Heights
Judy Holliday at her Judy Holidayest. $16. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Open Screen: Photo + Film
Public Functionary
To kick off Open Screen: The Forum, artists will be displaying photography and short film. Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
Friday, May 2
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway Theater
They’ll give you something to scream about! $13. 8 p.m. More info here.
Ua Ke: A Constellation of Intimate Truths
Public Functionary
A selection of short films about Hmong community and identity. Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
The Burmese Harp (1956)
Trylon
A traumatized Japanese WWII soldier becomes a monk. $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 9:15. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Fires on the Plain (1959)
Trylon
Kon Ichikawa’s classic about the horrors of war. $8. 9:30 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:30 p.m. More info here.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024)
Walker Art Center
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s study of the Martinique anticolonialist. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, May 3
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Alamo Drafthouse
The internet’s favorite Kubrick movie. Sold out. 11 a.m. More info here.
Eraserhead (1977)
Main Cinema
As I always say, you gotta hear this one in the theater. $11. 10 p.m. More info here.
Dan Savage’s 2025 HUMP! Film Festival: Part One
Parkway Theater
It’s the 20th anniversary of the sexy fest. $25. 6:30 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Georgia, Georgia (1972)
Walker Art Center
Script and music from Maya Angelou. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, May 4
Nashville (1975)
Alamo Drafthouse
Robert Altman is a little cynical about country music. $8.95. 11:15 a.m. More info here.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Do teen nerds still memorize this? I hope they do. Also Tuesday-Wednesday. $16.35. Showtimes and more info here.
Scream (1996)
Emagine Willow Creek
Don’t tell me what to do! Also Wednesday. $10.60. 3:50 & 6:45 p.m. More info here.
In the Mood for Love (2000)
Grandview 1&2
Best dresses ever. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Parkway Theater
Mads Mikkelsen creates the Death Star. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Joe (1970)
Trylon
Peter Boyle was so bummed that viewers celebrated his racist vigilante character that he passed on a shot to star in The French Connection. $8. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday. 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, May 5
Noroi: The Curse (2005)
Alamo Drafthouse
A researcher disappears while studying ectoplasmic worms. $11.95. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
Emagine Willow Creek
Orphans? Ghosts? The Spanish Civil War? It’s a Guillermo del Toro movie all right. $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
Heights Theater
So pretty. So sad. $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
$5 Secret Movie
Lagoon Cinema
Shh, don’t tell! $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, May 6
Deadly Spawn (1983)
Alamo Drafthouse
A vagina dentata is coming for you! 8 p.m. $8.95. More info here.
MSPIFF44 Shorts
Main Cinema
A selection of locally made short films from this year’s Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. $11.. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, May 7
Clown in a Cornfield (2025)
Alamo Drafthouse
Advance screening of a new killer clown movie. $11.95. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2012)
Alamo Drafthouse
Time for the Quarter Quell. $16. 7p.m. More info here.
3CM Less (2003)
Bryant Lake Bowl
Three Palestinian women try to reconcile with their families. Part of Mizna’s Insurgent Transmissions series. 7 p.m. $10. More info here.
Chungking Express (1994)
Edina 4
Movies don’t get much cooler than this. $12.15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Björk: Cornucopia (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
Björk live! 16.60. 7 p.m. More info here.
La Espera (The Wait) (2023)
Main Cinema
A man loses his family. And then things get worse. Part of the Minnesota Cuban Film Festival. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Parkway Theater
“Uptight normie is whisked into an underground NYC adventure” was a whole genre in the ’80s. $9-$12. Music from Elour at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
The hottest ticket in town. Sold out. $5. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bonjour Tristesse
A French teen girl has the kind of summer that French teen girls have in movies.
Hit: The Third Case
What if I didn’t see the first two cases?
Misericordia
You may know French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie from his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake, about the murderous and erotic goings on at a gay nude beach. But I think he’s topped himself, if you’ll pardon the phrase, with this nasty and often quite funny little thriller, in which a young man’s return to a village after the death of his mentor raises multiple questions. Were they doin' it? Why does the deceased’s son want him to scram? Why does the deceased’s wife want him to stay? And why does that priest keep hanging around? These queries get only more pressing after, yes, a murder. And while it’s darkly enjoyable to watch the killer squirm as he evades suspicion, what’s most wickedly fun about Misericordia is that you never quite know who wants to fuck who until their pants come off. A-
Raid 2
Whaddya know? Another Indian action movie.
Retro
You’re not gonna believe this, but yes, another Indian action movie.
Rosario
“Otherwordly entities” take over the corpse of a stockbroker’s grandma.
Secret Mall Apartment
How eight people lived hidden in a Rhode Island mall for four years.
The Surfer
Nicolas Cage just wants to surf with his son. But the local bullies won’t let him. Bad idea, local bullies!
Thunderbolts*
It’s not like other Marvel movies—it’s a cool Marvel movie.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Captain America: Brave New World
The Captain America movies are where the MCU gets “serious,” where comic book idealism clashes with the dark side of U.S. history, where unfettered heroism encounters the restraining forces of bureaucracy. With Anthony Mackie inheriting the shield, Brave New World adds race to that equation. After shouldering endless Steve Rogers comparisons, Mackie's Sam Wilson gets a little speech where he wonders if he'll ever be enough, while for contrast we have Isaiah Bradley (Carl Bradley), an older Black super soldier who’d been imprisoned by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) nearly gets us into a war with Japan (couldn’t be China—Disney needs that big overseas market) over adamantium, a new substa—ah, you know, don’t worry about it. Since in the real world, an authoritarian prez is seeking to purge the military (and everywhere else) of non-whites while saber-rattling with the nation’s historic allies, theoretically the film’s themes should resonate, at least in a half-assed pop culture thinkpiece kinda way. But this slapdash entry is more concerned with callbacks to the MCU D-list like the Eternals and 2008's The Incredible Hulk. Its one big reveal (unless you’re genuinely wondering, “Will Liv Tyler appear?”) was torpedoed by the need to fill seats: This would have been 10 times more fun if we didn’t know Ford was gonna Hulk out at the end, but the theaters would have been ten times emptier if the trailers didn’t spoil that. Brave New World is about one thing only: The MCU struggling to justify its continued existence. C
Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality—ends Thursday
On Swift Horses
There’s too much happening in Daniel Minahan’s period melodrama to condense into a blurb, so let’s just say it’s about a quasi-love triangle in the 1950s between a stolid homeowner (Will Poulter), his restless wife (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and his queer brother (Jacob Elordi). Edgar-Jones starts winning at the track and explores her bisexuality in a dalliance with a freethinking neighbor (Sasha Calle). Elordi falls for a coworker (Diego Calva) while working at a casino in Vegas. An absolutely unnecessary horse plays an unnecessarily prominent role. I’ve seen reviews invoke Douglas Sirk, and while I’m tickled by the idea of Todd Haynes’s Euphoria, that’s just wishful criticking. There’s just something very YA about all this: Edgar-Jones in particular seems to be living a 21st century fantasy of how it felt to rebel in a closeted past. What a waste of a good cast. B-
The Shrouds
In his later years, David Cronenberg has settled into what you could call the “hangout thriller,” a genre that’s decidedly not to everyone’s tastes. As with Crimes of the Future, multiple plots and counterplots are afoot in The Shrouds, but settling them never seems urgent, and Cronenberg is deliberately blasé about tying up loose ends. Vincent Cassel (not entirely comfortable in English) is Karsh, the proprietor of GraveTech, a full service burial company that specializes in The Shroud, a full-body cam that envelops a corpse and allows mourners to watch their loved one decompose over time. Karsh is obsessed with his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), whose disintegration he monitors via Shroud and who reappears to him in lurid dreams. Events require Karsh to reconnect with Maury (a wonderfully schlubby Guy Pearce), the nerdy programmer behind Karsh’s creation; he's obsessed with his ex-wife, Becca’s near-identical sister (Kruger again), whose idea of foreplay is batting about conspiracy theories. So much happens to ol’ Karsh—vandalism wrecks his cemetery, his flirtatious bitmoji of a personal assistant (still Kruger) gets flakier, and he’s seduced by the blind Korean wife (Sandrine Holt) of a Hungarian mogul who wants to help GraveTech go global—and yet so little apparently changes as a result. Call The Shrouds a tone poem (or a deadpan comedy) about the interconnections between paranoia and grief and jealousy. It might just annoy the hell out of you, but I was happy to loiter in this intriguing world in and remain just as happy to muse over its ideas after the fact. 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-
The Ugly Stepsister—ends Thursday
The Wedding Banquet
What all but tanks Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 international breakthrough is that in out ‘n’ proud 2025 everyone involved seems a little embarrassed by its wacky, recycled premise (gay man has to trick his traditional family into believing that a green card marriage is real). The film's attempts at a serious relationship drama are undercut by its screwball obligations. There are cute moments and a few laughs—especially from Joan Chen as a mother belatedly overcompensating for neglecting her daughter by going gangbusters with PFLAG—but it's a bummer to watch a terrific cast try to shoehorn themselves into an unnecessary remake instead of telling an original story about queer 21st century people of color. B-
