What movies am I referring to in the title? Well, one is reviewed in the "Opening" section and one in the "Ongoing." Always happy when the movies that are supposed to be good are actually, y'know, good.
Also, this is a holiday week, which means some movies open today, others later in the week, and some movies in theaters now won't be there by the weekend. Plan ahead!
Special Screenings
Tuesday, November 25
The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
Alamo Drafthouse
Alamo has this on its calendar, but the link says it's not showing and doesn't let you buy tix. Search me! 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, November 26
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)
Parkway Theater
Just in time for Thanksgiving. $9/$12. Music from Meatraffle Ska at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, November 27
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)
Alamo Drafthouse
In case you'd rather see it in Woodbury. $10.99. 4 p.m. More info here.
Friday, November 28
The Princess Bride (1987)
Orchestra Hall
The perennial childhood fave, with orchestral accompaniment. $87-$128. Friday-Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 2 p.m. More info here.
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Trylon
I always felt like the ending was a bit of a cheat, actually. $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 9:30 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Way of the Gun (2000)
Trylon
Ha, remember Ryan Phillippe? $8. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:15 p.m. More info here.
British Arrows Awards
Walker Art Center
The Walker’s annual holiday showcase of British commercials begins. $15/$18. 2 & 4 p.m. Saturday 6 & 8 p.m. Sunday 1, 2, 4 & 5 p.m. More info here.
Buck and the Preacher (1972)
Walker Art Center
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte are on the run from racist bounty hunters in this western. $12/$15. 7 p.m. Saturday 2 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, November 29
Little Women (2019)
Alamo Drafthouse
Saw someone tweet once that everyone thinks they’re a Jo but they’re really a Meg, and, damn, I know it’s true but you don’t have to say it. $10.99. 11:15 a.m. More info here.
Home Alone (1990)
Granada
These pricey Taste the Movies screenings sell out fast. Sold out. 5:30 & 8:30 p.m. More info here.
White Christmas (1954)
Heights Theater
Found out recently that Gary Giddins is not writing a third volume of his incredible Bing Crosby biography series. Crushed. Pre-movie performance by Maud Hixson. $20. Saturday-Sunday 2 p.m. Monday-Thursday 7 p.m. More info here.
Palestine 36 (2025)
Main Cinema
Palestinians battle for their land in 1936. $11. 12:45 p.m. More info here.
Smoke Signals (1998)
Mia
A young Native-American man travels cross country to retrieve the ashes of his estranged father with a friend who idolized the dead man. Free. 2 p.m. More info here.
Pinocchio (1940)
Parkway Theater
Why’d they have to make the goldfish so sexy though? $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Stand By Me (1987)
St. Paul Eagles Club
The classic coming-of-age flick, presented by TriLingua Cinema. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, November 30
Lethal Weapon (1987)
Alamo Drafthouse
Personally, if I were a police captain, I would not make the guy about to retire work with the suicidal psychopath. Seems like a bad decision. $10.99. 3:15 p.m. More info here.
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
It begins. $19. 12:15 p.m. More info here.
Another Sweet Christmas (2025)
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
We’re calling Candace Cameron Bure the “Queen of Christmas Movies” now? Ick. Through Tuesday. Showtimes, ticket prices, and more info here.
The Holiday (2006)
Emagine Willow Creek
Will these attractive people find love? Wednesday 6:30 p.m. $10.60. 2 p.m. More info here.
Fanny and Alexander (1983)
Grandview 1&2
I hate their stupid stepdad so much! Also Thursday. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
No! YOU’RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance (2025)
Parkway Theater
Crispin Hellion Glover presents his film tribute to his father. $25/$30. 7 p.m. More info here.
A Christmas Story (1983)
Roxy’s Cabaret
Never heard of it. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Island Closer to Heaven (1994)
Trylon
The Trylon’s Nobuhiko Ôbayashi series ends with a film about woman fulfilling a promise to her dead dad. $8. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Monday, December 1
Brazil (1985)
Alamo Drafthouse
Tis the season for… dystopia? $13.99. 6 p.m. More info here.
Little Women (2019)
Edina Mann
If you’d rather not drive out to Woodbury. Also Wednesday. $12.15. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Day of the Beast
(1995)
Emagine Willow Creek
A sacrilegious Xmas horror flick. $8.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, December 2
American Psycho (2000)
Alamo Drafthouse
Put Patrick Bateman in those State Farm commercials. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, December 3
Elf (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
Don’t miss your only chance to see Elf in theaters this holiday season. $20. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Met: Live in HD: Arabella
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Strauss is in the haus! Showtimes, ticket prices, and more info here.
The Holiday (2006)
Parkway Theater
In case you missed it on Sunday. $9/$12. Music from Favourite Girl at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
Sold out, as usual. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Eternity
Elizabeth Olsen must choose between Miles Teller and Callum Turner, who seem pretty interchangeable to me.
Hamnet
There’s no reason this should work. Hamlet isn’t “about” the death of Shakespeare’s only son, and even if the play was his way of processing that calamity, what’s that to us? But while I feared the biographical fallacy would run amok through (cursed phrase incoming) Chloé Zhao’s first film since Eternals—movies have a tedious habit of treating works of art as riddles we decode to understand an artist’s life—Hamnet honors the complexity of human creativity. It helps that the central figure isn’t Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, here to make the girlies weep once more), but his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a “forest witch” (as the villagers say) who takes to motherhood intensely, with a protectiveness born out of her visions of dark foreboding. With the aid of DP Łukasz Żal’s muddy tones and chiaroscuro interiors, and an allusive yet plainspoken script co-written with Maggie O'Farrell (author of the novel that serves as source material), Zhao creates a credible Elizabethan world, and Buckley’s performance, ranging from the subtle flickers of a smile to wracked howls of grief, is all-encompassing. The final segment—the premiere of Hamlet itself—is the emotional equivalent of juggling chainsaws, yet Buckley’s commitment anchors a conceit that could as easily elicit snickers as sniffles. In her expression we watch as the stuff of life—mourning, family drama, the unworthiness we feel in the face of personal tragedy—is subsumed into something greater than its components. A
The Thing With Feathers
Grief literally invades a bereaved family’s life as a crow. Subtle.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
I think these movies are fun.
Zootopia 2
On the trail (tail?) of a snake!
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bugonia
Even when I like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, I feel kinda played—there’s just something so smugly conniving about his glib riffs off our cultural moment, as though he’s figured out exactly how much nihilist grotesquerie titillates Americans without turning them off. But I can’t deny how thoroughly he rips a simple idea to shreds once his jaws clench down. Here, Lanthimos chomps on the paradox of how conspiracy theorists can acutely diagnose societal ills while veering so ludicrously off base when it comes to assigning blame. Jesse Plemons is Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper whose mother is in a coma because she participated in a clinical trial run by pharmaceutical behemoth Auxolith. Putting two and two together, Teddy arrives at the obvious conclusion that this is all part of an extraterrestrial plot to destroy humanity. With often reluctant help from his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, providing what little heart the movie has), Teddy kidnaps Auxolith’s glam girlboss, who is, of course, Emma Stone. Down as ever for whatever Yorgos flings at her, Stone particularly excels at the effortless doublespeak of the affluent, as she displayed in The Curse. I mean, rich people do sound like aliens when they talk to us. Bugonia succeeds primarily as a series of tense moments—Teddy’s interrogations of Michelle, a visit to Teddy’s home from a cop with a creepy past, Michelle’s attempts to turn Don against his cousin—but I appreciate how Lanthimos undercuts what could be an absurdist catharsis with a grim coda. And corporate queen Stone, head back, singing along to “Good Luck, Babe!” as her Range Rover cruises down the highway, is an indelible image of our age. A-
Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
Frankenstein—ends November 25
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 fiancé 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
It Was Just an Accident—ends November 26
Jafar Panahi’s first film since Iran lifted its hideous sanctions against him is a manic riff on Death and the Maiden that dips a toe in black comedy without ever diving in—fitting for a movie so openly about hesitation it doesn’t shy away from mentioning Godot. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is an Azerbaijani mechanic who was once tortured in an Iranian prison. When a one-legged man (Ebrahim Azizi) stops at his garage one night, Vahid is convinced that this is his torturer. At first, that is—the next day, after he snatches the guy and begins to bury him alive, he has second thoughts. And so he enlists a whole crew of victims, including a bride, a groom, a wedding photographer, and her short-fused ex, to confirm his hunch. As they hem and haw, Iran’s bribe-ridden authorities persistently rial and dime them at every turn; a good-hearted Vahid even winds up assisting his prisoner’s family. At time you almost forget that these people are haunted by an experience they will never escape. Hollywood loves to assure us that a vengeful spirit exists inside us all, just waiting for an excuse to be unleashed. Ever the humanist, Panahi disagrees. Yes, this crew is inept and indecisive when it comes to revenge, he seems to say, but wouldn’t you be too? A-
Karen Kingsbury’s The Christmas Ring—ends November 26
Nuremberg
Nuremberg promises us both a stirring old-school courtroom drama and a keen psychological battle of wits, and on both counts it only half delivers. After WWII, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is determined to take down imprisoned Nazi second-in-command Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) in a fair trial. The film practically plays up the devious Göring as a Hannibal Lecter figure, and his would-be Will Graham is psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), sent to find out what makes the runner-up Führer tick. As Jackson, Shannon has the needed gravitas and pride, and the skills to nuance the thunderous Oscarish moments. The supporting cast is good as well: Colin Hanks always makes a good pinhead, John Slattery would have regular work if they still made war pictures like they used to, and Richard E. Grant is quietly effective as the Brit who saves Jackson’s ass. Malek is fine, but he really needs to learn not to constantly smirk. Anyway, I was there to see Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, and he delivered the same precise hamminess he brings to the title role as The Pope’s Exorcist or Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder. He doesn’t render Göring human—that would be silly. But he does create a well-rounded film character, and that’s all Nuremberg requires. B
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
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier may be the kindest great director of his generation and its most gently devastating—a sort of Scandinavian Ozu. In his latest, Stellan Skarsgård is Gustav Borg, a once-heralded filmmaker who hasn’t worked in 15 years. Gustav was also, you won’t be surprised to learn, a terrible father who abandoned his wife and his two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve), who resents his absence, and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who seems to have made her peace. Gustav returns on the day of their mother’s funeral and offers Nora a part in his new film, which reckons with their family’s dark past. When she rejects his offer, he instead casts Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who gradually realizes she’s wrong for the part. All this could be the stuff of high drama or broad comedy, but Trier generally keeps both extremes at a low simmer. Reinsve, as the daughter reluctantly recognizing herself in her father, is no less an incarnation of millennial neurosis here than in The Worst Person in the World, while Skarsgård exercises his charm and authority lightly but firmly, regret battling stubbornness in his every action. At the center of the film is the Borg home, a creaky old storehouse of memories that allows Trier to exercise his easy way with chronology. The film slips into the past then fast-forwards, creating the sense that the past is always just beyond our reach, even while we’re firmly stuck in the present. A
Sisu: Road to Revenge
The killer Finn is back again. (Pronounce that “aginn” and it rhymes.)
Wicked: For Good
Reading the plot synopsis made me dizzy. Too. Much. Plot.
