The March doldrums have set in, but it's a surprisingly lively week for new releases. Alpha and Sound of Falling top my to-see list, but I'm curious about Forbidden Fruits and André is an Idiot as well. Meanwhile, the Hitchcock Film Festival, an annual Heights/Trylon collab, kicks off this week. And I've got a review up of the excellent A Poet, showing one last time at the Main this afternoon.
Special Screenings
Thursday, March 26
Twin Peaks: The Return—Episodes 16-18 (2017)
Alamo Drafthouse
Coop is back and he’s gonna fix everything. $10.99. 2:45 p.m. Saturday 11:30 p.m. Monday 3:15 p.m. More info here.
The First Hymn (2026)
AMC Rosedale 14/Marcus West End
They mean the first Christian hymn. Of course. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
Bring Me The Horizon - L.I.V.E. in Sao Paulo (Live Immersive Virtual Experiment) (2026)
AMC Southdale 16
You wanted the horizon, you got the horizon. $16. 7 p.m. Saturday 3 p.m. More info here.
Repo Man (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
This soundtrack changed my life. $10. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Mallrats (1995)
Grandview 1&2
I heard this was filmed in Minnesota someplace? $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Rooted: Stories from Minnesota’s Farming Future (2026)
Main Cinema
The first original documentary from the Grand Northern Festival. $15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, March 27
Anything That Moves (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
"An erotically charged, blood-soaked thriller" and a "rust belt giallo"? Well then! $17. 7 p.m. More info here.
Donnie Darko (2001)
Heights Theater
I’m sure some guy will be happy to explain it to you. $13. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It (2025)
Parkway Theater
A look at the private life of the prominent musician. $15/$20. More info here.
Network (1976)
Trylon
What if TV news was bad? $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 9:30 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Demonlover (2002)
Trylon
What if the internet was bad? $8. 9:30 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, March 28
Superpower Dogs (2019)
AMC Southdale 16
Dogs do amazing things in IMAX. $6.50. Noon. More info here.
Wall-E (2008)
Heights Theater
Rollin’ around by yourself on a trash world doesn’t look all that bad. $13. 11 a.m. More info here.
Clue (1985)
Heights Theater
Can’t believe they made a board game out of this movie. $13. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
20 Feet From Stardom (2013)
Mia
A look at some of the great backup singers. Free. 2 p.m. More info here.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Parkway Theater
Would you keep it down? I’m trying to watch the movie! $10/$15. Midnight. More info here.
The Terminator (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
What if killer robots from the future were bad? $10. 7:30 p.m. More info here
Sunday, March 29
The Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition Marathon (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
Got seven hours to spare? $25. 11 a.m. More info here.
Ben Hur (1959)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Do any Christian movies have chariot races anymore? They do not. Also Monday, Wednesday, & Thursday. Prices, times, and more info here.
David (2025)
AMC Southdale 16
Animated tale of the giant-slayer. $9.25. 4:20 p.m. More info here.
Jesus Revolution (2023)
AMC Southdale 16
Is it Easter yet? $7. 7:20 p.m. More info here.
Secret Skate Video Round 3
Emagine Willow Creek
So secret they’re not even listing the ticket prices. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Grandview 1&2
Monkeys get smart, kill, go to space. Also Thursday. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
Heights Theater
Hitchcock season begins with this atmospheric silent. $20. 11:30 a.m. More info here.
Twilight (2008)
Lagoon Cinema
Some vampire movie or something. $11. 2 p.m. Wednesday 4:25 & 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Jenin, Jenin (2002) + Janin, Jenin (2024)
Main Cinema
Mohammed Bakri's twin documentaries about the Palestinian refugee camp murderously razed by Israeli troops. Free. 1 p.m. More info here.
Fire. 50 Women Run 50K (2025)
Main Cinema
Running an ultra-distance race in northern Minnesota. $15. 4 p.m. More info here.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Roxy’s Cabaret
Never heard of it. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Trylon
What if supersharks were bad? $8. 8 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, March 30
AMC Scream Unscreen
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A new scary movie. $7. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Lair of the White Worm (1998)
Emagine Willow Creek
Ken Russell, you so silly. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
MSPIFF45 Preview Party
Main Cinema
Yep, MSPIFF is coming soon. Free for MSP Film Society members. 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Marcus Mystery Movie
Marcus West End
Another scary new movie. Or maybe the same one? $6. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, March 31
The Sacrament (2014)
Alamo Drafthouse
Ti West does found footage. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, April 1
The Mystery of Musica Cubana: La Clave (2022)
Main Cinema
An exploration of the rhythms at the heart of Cuban music. Part of the Cuban Film Festival. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
Whoa, there are still tickets available. April Fools! Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, April 2
Souleymane’s Story (2025)
Capri Theater
An African refugee seeks asylum in France. Full review here. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
RIP Rob Reiner (as well as multiple drummers). $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Psycho (1960)
Heights Theater
A secretary steals $40,000 from her boss. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Blade Runner (1982)
Parkway Theater
Fun idea for a series this month: Movies set in a future year that is now the past. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Dog Star Man (1961-1964)
Walker Art Center
Stan Brakhage’s experimental film classic. $6/$8. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
A man concerned about AI is reassured by the people who stand to make a lot of money from AI.
Alpha
The latest from Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane) is not getting great reviews, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.
André is an Idiot
A comedy about a man with a terminal disease. Lol!
Forbidden Fruits
Women who work at the mall are secretly witches. I knew it.
Love Mocktail
A man rescues a woman and then tells her about his sad past.
A Magnificent Life
A new French animated feature, aka Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol.
Marc by Sofia
That’s Jacobs and Coppola.
The Mummy Returns
Back in theaters for its 25th anniversary.
Sound of Falling
The lives of multiple generations of German women are connected by a farmhouse.
Stand By Me
Back in theaters for its 40th anniversary.
Super Mario Galaxy (starts Tuesday)
Shrug.
Suyodhana
A new Indian thriller.
They Will Kill You
I’m glad Zazie Beetz is getting work.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
The Bride!—full review here, ends March 26
I genuinely envy those who are calling this one of the worst movies they’ve ever seen—oh, you sheltered lambs. As messy a Rorschach blot as the black splatter on the side of the titular reanimated gal’s mouth, The Bride! is an ADHD fever dream that inverts text and subtext and plows through subplots en route to the nearest dead end. You can decide for yourself whether that sounds like a compliment. At the behest of Victor Frankenstein’s infernal creature (Christian Bale) Annette Benning’s bespectacled Dr. Euphronius revives a 1930s Chicago party girl named Ida (Jessie Buckley). Complicating matters, however, is that the Bride of Frank (as he calls himself) is also possessed by the spirit of an extremely pissed off Mary Shelley (also Buckley). Soon, Frank and his Bride set off a spree that’s equal parts nonsense and fun, though we’ll all disagree which is which. Buckley’s curse as an actor is that she only ever gives the kind of performance that you have to nail 100%. Sometimes that wins you an Oscar, and sometimes you leave audiences violently Danny-Devito-meming their heads back and forth. As Frank, Bale hasn’t been this endearing (or endurable) onscreen in years. He’s a softboy with a violent streak he deplores, as close to Shelley’s concept of the tortured natural philosopher as any film depiction has come. In any case, I’m amused by how haters smugly call this a flop. Gyllenhaal found someone to give her $90 million for the movie she wanted to make. May we all flop so lucratively. B
One Battle After Another—ends March 26
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
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man—ends March 26
A Poet—ends March 26
Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is a walking punchline—a sloppy, slouching, centavo-less little guy closing in on 60 who greets the world with the gaping pout of a Kurosawa peasant. He’s also a failed poet who refuses to suck it up and make a living, preferring to drunkenly hold forth about his ideals while living off his ailing mother’s (Margarita Soto) pension and the occasional “loan” from his embarrassed teen daughter (Alisson Correa). When Oscar reluctantly takes a teaching job, though, he finds a possible purpose in life in the person of Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), a student with a natural gift for poetry. Oscar tries to coax her into the life of the artist, but Yurlady, who comes from a struggling working class family and expresses herself solely for her own satisfaction, wants to know what’s in it for her. He’s hardly an enticing role model, after all. Writer/director Simón Mesa Soto’s nastily funny script leaves no piety unskewered, equally unsparing to the nonprofit poetry org hoping to cash in on a poor Black savant and to Yurlady’s family, happy to make a couple bucks off the kid’s unexpected talents. A Poet also puts the screws to Oscar, with Rios never backing down from his characterization of a moderately talented fuck up. Still, Oscar emerges as a flawed human rather than a cartoon. A Poet is a movie that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to, and that’s as rare a thing as a versifying child prodigy. A-
Project Hail Mary
Anyone who has a heart will love this adorably techno-optimistic film about Ryan Gosling buddying up with an intelligent alien who looks like a rock as they save the galaxy together. I guess so, anyway—I’m extrapolating from the fact that even a soulless monster like me thought it was pretty cute. Interstellar parasites are gobbling up the stars, including our sun, and as will happen when the Earth is in danger, only a middle school science teacher can save the day. Ryland Grace (which sounds like a name Gosling would give if he wanted to check into a hotel in secret) is recruited by a grim German bureaucrat (the great Sandra Hüller, who deserves all the Hollywood blockbuster cash that comes her way) to research these solar gluttons. His insights prove so invaluable he’s sent on a suicide mission to the only star that’s proven impervious to the baddies to learn how to counteract them. There he meets an alien scientist on the same quest for his own world, who he dubs Rocky, and both species work together to etc. etc. as their unique friendship and so on and so forths. Drew Goddard’s script, adapted from the much-loved Andy Weir novel, has the same plucky scientific spirit as Goddard’s script of Weir’s The Martian, and Gosling remains likeable as ever, though I do wish he’d find some new ways to be likeable. The pleased laughter all around me at the screening was so delightful I felt left out a little. Maybe someday when the wizard grants me a heart I’ll give this another go. B
Sinners—ends March 26
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 cinematographer 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-
Sirât
Óliver Laxe’s existential desert thriller is certainly overwhelming, if not overstimulating, but also a little exhausting. A portly Spanish dad sets off into the North African desert with his son hoping to locate his adult daughter; there the searchers fall in with a crew of itinerant ravers and trail the dancers’ fitted-out trailers in a far less geographically appropriate minivan. As some sort of military action closes in on the travelers, they slowly learn that the small space of pleasure and community they’ve carved out for themselves will no longer serve as an escape from the wider world. Sergi López (a long way from his role as the fascist stepdad in Pan’s Labyrinth) is excellent as the father, and Laxe gets just the kind of naturalist performances from his non-professional actors as Sirât needs. The dance sequences are tremendous visually and sonically; the settings are a cinematographer’s fantasy, and Mauro Herce does them justice. Laxe concocts a few of the tensest moments in recent cinema—I gasped aloud more than once (though I’m admittedly a pretty jumpy guy)—and no one is safe. (Add this to the 2025 “you can’t protect your kids” canon.) But though he's clearly trying to multiply Friedkin times Antonioni, as the bodies piled up I felt emotionally toyed with. To paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy; a half-dozen or so starts to feel like a melodrama. B
Slanted —ends March 26
“Wuthering Heights”—full review here.
Dumb people can make great movies, but Emerald Fennell will never be one of them. The problem with “Wuthering Heights” (yes, I noticed the quotes, very postmodern, wink wink) isn’t that it’s unfaithful to Emily Brontë’s novel. The problem is it’s just worse. Margot Robbie reduces Cathy to a peevish little bitch who somehow gets more childish as she gets older, and as for Jacob Elordi, I’m starting to suspect that his whole career is tall privilege—a Heathcliff that we mostly feel sorry for is no Heathcliff at all. What still rattles us about Brontë is the emotional violence, the psychic degradation, that sense of the demonic that haunts even those of us who don’t believe we have eternal souls. But Fennell is saddled with the sexual imagination of a teen virgin—she’s titillated by sex but also grossed out. She tries to make Wuthering Heights sexier by having Cathy and Heathcliff fuck and then tossing in some peripheral BDSM moments, but that just makes it cornier. And she seems to believe her modern perspective allows her a freedom denied to any benighted 19th century lass. Girl, you cannot be more fucked up than a Brontë sister. Don’t even try it. C-
