Whew, I've got an unprecedented five new movie reviews for you this week. Scroll down for my thoughts on Final Destination: Bloodlines, Friendship, Pavements, Bring Her Back, and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
Special Screenings
Thursday, May 29
Switchblade Sisters (1975)
Alamo Drafthouse
Babes with blades. $15.18. 6 p.m. More info here.
I Should Have Been Dead Years Ago: The Raw Life of Stuart Gray (2024)
Cloudland Theater
The story of Stu Spasm from Australia’s Lubricated Goat. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Emagine Willow Creek
With Val Kilmer as Gay Perry. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Twilight (2008)
Grandview 1&2
Who knew we were looking at indie cinema’s two future stars? $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Fortune Cookie (1966)
The Heights
The first Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau team-up. $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Village Next to Paradise (2024)
Main Cinema
The first Somali film to be an official selection at Cannes is a lovely story of a family trying to find its way. $11. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Goldfish (2019)
Trylon
A disabled banker learns to live again thanks to some friends. $3. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, May 30
La page blanche (2022)
Alliance Française
Amnesia changes a woman’s life. Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
Parkway Theater
The great Hitchcock silent, with original score from Paris 1919. $15/$20. 8 p.m. More info here.
Slither (1973)
Trylon
The sequel to Slith. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 9 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, May 31
The Met: Live in HD - Il Barbiere di Siviglia
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
The Looney Tunes classic. Also Wednesday. $28.70. 12 p.m. More info here.
Grease (1978)
Emagine Willow Creek
Olivia Newton-John sluts herself up for a boy. Also Sunday & Wednesday. $10.60. 3:20 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
j-hope Tour 'HOPE ON THE STAGE' in JAPAN: LIVE (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
A K-pop concert film. Also Sunday. $26.60. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Laurel and Hardy Festival (1929-1934)
Heights Theater
Plenty of fine messes. Also Sunday. 1 p.m. $15. More info here.
Paris Is Burning (1990)
Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center
The classic documentary about New York drag culture. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Force Awakens (2015)
Parkway Theater
And I just got it to sleep! $7-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 1
Outland (1981)
Trylon
It’s High Noon on a moon of Jupiter. $8. 7 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, June 2
Stand By Me (1987)
Alamo Drafthouse
Wil Wheaton is Ben E. King in this unusual music biopic. $15.18. 6 p.m. More info here.
Popcorn (1991)
Emagine Willow Creek
A slasher stalks a film festival! $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Goonies (1985)
Heights Theater
Great Cyndi Lauper song, I’ll give it that. $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 3
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Alamo Drafthouse
Remember when zombies used to be slow? $11.91. 8 p.m. More info here.
The Face of Jesus (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Crackpots defend the authenticity of the Shroud of Turn and the Veil of Manoppello. $18.95. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sabbath Queen (2024)
Main Cinema
Meet rabbi/drag queen Amichai Lau-Lavie. $11. 7 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 4
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014)
Alamo Drafthouse
Personally I would never mock Jay. $15.18. 6 p.m. More info here.
Queer Cinema for Palestine
Bryant Lake Bowl
A selection of short films. Part of Mizna’s Insurgent Transmissions series. $5-$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Footloose (2011)
The Commons
Dancing should not be illegal. Well, maybe your dancing should be. Free. 8:55 p.m. More info here.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Edina 4
So. Much. Yearning. $14.44. 7 p.m. More info here.
Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time (2003)
Main Cinema
Doc about the great Cuban doo-wop/rock ‘n’ roll group. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
Sold out through September! $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bhairavam
This week’s new Indian action film.
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
Detective Kien: The Headless Horror
Sadly, it is not the detective, but the body he finds, that is headless.
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-
Karate Kid: Legends
Starring Northfield's own Ben Wang.
Khaleja
A rerelease of the 2010 Indian action flick.
Pavements
Alex Ross Perry begins from a very Pavement-like supposition: Music documentaries are as fatuous as music stardom. So his take on the quintessential ’90s indie heroes is a kind of gonzo cubism, mixing straight band reunion footage with three fabricated conceits: a trendy pop-up Pavement museum, a Pavement jukebox musical, and a clunky by-the-numbers Pavement biopic with Joe Keery going full method as Stephen Malkmus. Ironic self-indulgence is still self-indulgence, and at times, Pavements plays like an extended prank on the band. I mean, I think they're the best white male band of the Clinton years, and at times even I would rather have just watched some old footage. But if you’re the right person seeing this with the right crowd, as I am and I did, it’s as funny as Friendship. B+
Peppa Meets the Baby
There’s a new piglet in town.
Tornado
The daughter of a puppeteer seeks vengeance.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
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-
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-
Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted—ends Thursday
No, that is not a euphemism. Soul eccentric Jerry Williams (aka Swamp Dogg), the author of songs you may know like “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got)” and songs you should know like “I’ve Never Been to Africa (And It’s Your Fault)” has been a cult legend since Total Destruction to Your Mind dropped in 1970 (and he was a music industry pro for a decade before that). He deserves a documentary as idiosyncratic as his genius, and directors (and musicians) Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson deliver. This is music doc as hangout movie—we’re not barraged by talking head testimony to the 81-year-old singer’s legacy, but instead we get to lounge out in the California sun with Swamp and his bandmates and roommates as they reminisce about the past. And though Swamp lives out in L.A., there’s plenty of Minnesota local color: Singer Dizzy Fae appears in one segment and rapper Greg Grease narrates. This one’s a pure delight. A-
