My sympathies to any parents out there who have watch another goddamn Minions movie this weekend. For the rest of us, there are a couple late-night screenings of the '70s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Riverview (RIP Donald Sutherland), the start of The Heights' Elizabeth Taylor series (previewed here), and (fingers extremely crossed that Ti West can pull it off) MaXXXine.
Oh, and remember how I said I'd write a full review of Kinds of Kindness last week? Other duties took precedence. But I've dashed off a short evaluation down below.
Special Screenings
Wednesday, July 3
The Sandlot (1993)
The Commons
Inflict your childhood on your kids. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Jaws (1975)
Emagine Willow Creek
'Tis the season. $11. 12 & 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Emagine Willow Creek
Emagine may just play the Spider-Verse movies all summer long, and why shouldn't they? Also Thursday. $3. 11 a.m. More info here.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
The Heights
Watching two middle-aged alcoholics (Elizabeth Taylor and her frequent husband, Richard Burton) joust with each other and torment a younger couple over the course of an evening remains a wonderfully excruciating experience. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Twisters (2024)
Trylon
This is my favorite blockbuster ripoff title yet. Also Thursday. $8. 1 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks July
Trylon
They got featured on WCCO and now this show is sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, July 4
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
Riverview Theater
Meatballs falling from the sky? Preposterous! $1. $10.30 a.m. More info here.
Friday, July 5
Shrek (2001)
Dickman Park
Never heard of it. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway
Who doesn't need to let a good scream or 12 just about now? $13/$19. 8 p.m. More info here.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Riverview Theater
A great way to mourn Donald Sutherland. $5. 10:30 p.m. More info here.
10 Cloverfield Lane (1978)
Trylon
Trapped in a bunker with John Goodman! For some a dream, for others a nightmare. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 9:15 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5:15 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, July 6
Big Shark (2023)
The Main Cinema
Tommy Wiseau's (much belated) answer to Jaws, I guess. $10. 10 p.m. More info here.
Spirited Away (2001)
Parkway Theater
The Parkway's month of Studio Ghibli films leads off with a classic. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (2022)
Webber Park
That's a lot of Kung Fu Pandas. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, July 7
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
Richard Dreyfuss is a terrible dad and husband. $16.35. 3 & 7 p.m. Wednesday 7 p.m. More info here.
The Mask (1994)
Emagine Willow Creek
A mild-mannered bank employee turns into Jim Carrey when he puts on a mask. $9. 12 & 5:30 p.m. Wednesday 1:30 p.m. & 6:50 p.m. More info here.
Scab Vendor (2023)
The Main Cinema
A documentary about groundbreaking tattoo artist Jonathan Shaw. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
One Cut of the Dead (2017)
Trylon
Can a hack shoot a zombie flick in one take? The answer may amuse you. $8. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, July 8
Razorback (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
A wild boar terrorizes Australians. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Dear England
The Main Cinema
A filmed version of a National Theatre performance of a play about soccer. $20. 7 p.m. Wednesday 12:30 p.m. More info here.
Cool Runnings (1993)
Painter Recreation Center
Still hard to believe they made a whole movie about the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, July 9
The Marvels (2023)
Father Hennepin Bluff Park
Superhero movies—they just keep makin' 'em. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
The 48 Hour Film Project
Parkway Theater
Filmmakers get two days to complete their entries in this contest, and the results are screened here. $14 for an individual screening, $22 for both. 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, July 10
Top Gun (1986)
The Commons
A little late for Pride. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Secret Movie Night
Emagine Willow Creek
Every month, Emagine invites a local notable to pick an undisclosed movie. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Grandview 1&2
Divorce makes the members of an insufferable Brooklyn family even more insufferable. $12. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Kneecap (2024)
Trylon
A Belfast rap trio strive to preserve their native language. Presented by Sound Unseen. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Despicable Me 4
My favorite bit of minions lore is that they couldn't have taken part in the Holocaust because they were exiled to Antarctica.
Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot
I think this is one of those movies that they bus people in from church to watch.
MaXXXine
Can Ti West stick the landing with the final movie in his horror/porn trilogy? And aren't you sick of people saying "stick the landing"?
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
No really, what we gonna do about this? Rebooted in 2020 with Moroccan-Belgian directing duo Adil & Bilall honoring the bludgeoning legacy of Michael Bay, this franchise sticks to the basics: Two Miami cops banter and shoot people until it’s time to blow up something big. But the fourth installment in the series adds (ugh) heart, as Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus have to clear the name of their dead captain (Joe Pantoliano) after a cartel-adjacent thug (Eric Dane, aiming for sociopathic and hitting somnolent) posthumously frames him as dirty. In between wisecracks and explosions, I couldn’t help but wonder why these movies bum me out so much. Is it the abrupt shifts from comedy to sentimentality to brutality? The way they accentuate Smith’s most unattractive qualities as an actor (especially a smug self-righteousness)? The dreary sense that this is all people are really looking for from movies? I can’t deny that Bad Boys: Ride or Die does give the people what they want—the ladies behind me were practically giddy when an alligator ate the character they’d hoped he would. But if I had to pick, I’ll go with die. C
The Bikeriders
Sixty years after Scorpio Rising and, hell, 40 years after the Village People, it’s unclear why writer/director Jeff Nichols is being lauded for acknowledging that there’s a homoerotic subtext to biker gangs. At the center of The Bikeriders is a tug of war over the affections of a chiseled sociopath named Benny (Austin Butler), a struggle between his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer) and his mush-mouthed but wily gang leader Johnny (Tom Hardy). But in part because Benny’s such a cipher, Nichols’s adaptation of Danny Lyon’s 1968 photobook can’t make much drama out of this conflict, so instead The Bikeriders drifts in that familiar subcultural underworld way from glory days to druggy, violent decline. Despite an occasional Goodfellas homage, Nichols doesn’t zero in on the social dynamics of the gang, as Scorsese invariably does with his milieux, which is a shame because plenty of the members, especially Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus, have some terrific individual moments. That this is often an engrossing watch regardless owes to Hardy’s squinty inscrutability and Comer’s commonsensical perspective. Wid her “oh jeez” Chicawgo accent and everygal resolve, Comer steals the movie. It’s just not always clear where she wants to take it. B
Blue Lock The Movie - Episode Nagi -
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
Inside Out 2
Inside Out’s model of the human psyche was something only Pixar could have dreamt up (derogatory): Your brain is an office staffed with project managers jockeying for control of your emotional responses. Despite the corporatized determinism at its core, the 2015 movie worked dramatically because its story of a Minnesota girl named Riley played off adult sympathies for distressed children in the sort of pitiless, heart-wrenching way that only Pixar can (complimentary, I think?). In this noisy, chaotic follow up, Riley enters adolescence and a new emotion, Anxiety, shows up to the job. The upstart feeling stages a coup, literally bottles up Joy and other inconvenient emotions, and constructs Riley’s sense of self based wholly on the perception of others. There’s so much focus on the internal conflict here that Riley becomes a puppet yanked too and fro, and the emotional dynamics make no sense even on their own terms. C+
I Saw the TV Glow (read the full review here)
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun once again reconfigures the trans coming-out narrative as a horror story, as open to peril as to promise. Two teens growing up in the ’90s bond over a Buffy-style show; as the edges of supposed fiction and supposed reality blur, the knowledge they gain about their potential selves brings suffering, whether they accept or retreat from that insight. A jarring remix of ’90s kid culture, recollected in something less than tranquility, I Saw the TV Glow reinstates the TV as the box of ominous mystery it once was, solid enough not just to represent other worlds, but to contain them. The weird is familiarized, the familiar is enweirdened. And in Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith, Schoenbrun has two leads who know how to communicate within Lynchian blend of heightened mood and flattened affect. A-
Janet Planet
The directorial debut of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker is an uncommonly nuanced telling of a not uncommon movie subject—the life of a sensitive and intelligent child raised by a caring but woo-woo parent. Julianne Nicholson is the single mom, and Zoe Zigler is her 11-year old daughter, Lacey, and both are terrific. The film is structured by the entrance and exit of three people in Janet’s life: a boyfriend named Wayne, an old friend named Regina, and a spiritual puppeteer named Avi given to high flown pronouncements. Possessive of her mother, Lacy resents each of these interlopers, with various degrees of appropriateness. (I wouldn’t want Avi anywhere near my mom either.) But along the way, without the clamor of any hackneyed cinematic epiphanies, the girl develops an awareness of her mother as a flawed but real person, a woman Baker presents to us without blame but without excuses. A-
Kinds of Kindness
Well, he couldn’t have called it Cruels of Cruelness now, could he? Critics are referring to Yorgos Lanthimos’s new three-fer as a triptych because he’s European, but the Greek provocateur’s follow up to Poor Things is a simple old anthology film—the ironies slam shut on each of these three diverting vignettes with such self-pleasured finality that you half-expect a closing word to follow from Rod Serling, or even the Cryptkeeper. Lanthimos recycles a seven-actor cast headed up by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons over the course of each mini-film, and if the stories don’t intersect, they do share a consistent worldview. Lanthimos tips his hand as soon as the production credits hit the screen, as Eurythmics’ propulsive “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” among the more cynical hits of a cynical decade, thumps out of the speakers before we see a single image of the film. Used, meet users. Abused, meet abusers. It’s a dark place, the Yorgosphere: sexual in an unsexy way, with all manner of kinky couplings and triplings and even quadruplings shown or implied, and violent in a way that’s both graphic and cartoonish, the stuff of squeams and giggles. Sometimes everything’s a joke and other times you laugh because the mood is too grim not to be funny. But perhaps only the most committed Lanthimophile has ever wanted to watch three of the director’s movies in one sitting. B
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Thanks in part to Andy Serkis’s unparalleled gift for portraying a motion-captured being with nuance and sympathy, screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver somehow created a non-laughably epic saga out of an intelligent simian’s rise to power with their rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy. At least that’s how I remember it—this fourth installment (with frequent Jaffa/Silver collaborator Josh Friedman taking over the script) is so ape-by-numbers I’m kinda afraid to rewatch its predecessors. The plot concerns a struggle over the legacy of Serkis’s honorable Caesar (along with some nasty human weaponry), and as ever, the chimps are curious, the gorillas brutal, the orangutans wise, the humans deceptive. Despite a few fine action scenes, Kingdom is as humorless as the trilogy but without its grand sweep, as misanthropic but without its capacity to imagine looming disaster. I’ve always been leery of how these films toy with the eco-nihilist claim that Earth is better off without humans, but this sort of IP busywork does make me think twice. Will ape and human someday learn to live together in peace? Who gives a fuck? C+
Thelma
A nonegenarian (June Squibb) gets scammed online and then tracks down the evildoers to get her money back—it’s kinda like The Beekeeper if Phylicia Rashad hadn’t needed Statham to avenge her. Squibb is generally wonderful as the plucky old gal, but despite some cute moments the whole shebang still felt a little too “hooray for the aged” overall. For me, that is. Everyone seems to love this movie. Maybe my experience was flavored by an excessively enthusiastic MSPIFF crowd? Or maybe I really do expect too much from movies? B-
