A slow week for new releases, but hot one for older flicks. I plan to hit Bullitt tonight, The Wolf House this weekend, and maybe Touch of Evil if I've got the time. Also, if you're curious, scroll down to "Ongoing" for my Furiosa review.
Special Screenings
Thursday, May 30
Bullitt (1968)
The Heights
The original hipster cop. I hear there's a pretty good car chase in this one. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Conjuring (2013)
The Parkway
Beware the haunted farmhouse! $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Wolves—and I cannot stress this enough—back. Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Friday, May 31
Little Empty Boxes (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
A documentarian tries to understand his mother's dementia. Also Sunday. $11. 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Stop Making Sense (1984)
The Riverview
I don't know why they're showing it, but it's the best concert movie of all time so who needs an excuse? $7. Friday-Saturday 9 p.m. Monday, Wednesday 5:20 p.m. Tuesday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Wolf House (2018)
Trylon
Wolf back. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 8:45 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, June 1
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012)
Alamo Drafthouse
Electric (Dawn) Boogaloo. $15.04. 7:25 p.m. More info here.
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Lake Harriet Park
This movie has so much editing! Free. 8:52 p.m. More info here.
Killer Condom (1996)
The Main
It has teeth? Ouch! $10. 10 p.m. More info here.
Logan's Run (1976)
The Parkway
You live your 20s in sexy leisure and then die at 30? Hm, tell me more, I'm intrigued. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
The 2024 HUMP! Film Festival: Part One
The Parkway
Twenty-four wide-ranging erotic films brought to you by one-time syndicated Racket sex columnist Dan Savage. $25. 6:30 & 9 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Yes, there will be a Game 6. Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 2
Stagecoach (1939)
Alamo Drafthouse
Even if (like me) you're cold on John Wayne westerns, this is the exception. $10.74. 11:30 a.m. More info here.
The Muppet Movie (1979)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Showplace ICON/Emagine Willow Creek
All your kids’ favorite stars have cameos in this one: Charles Durning, Edgar Bergen, and, of course, Orson Welles. $11.94. 1 & 7 p.m. Monday 7 p.m. More info here.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Emagine Willow Creek
Team World. Also Wednesday. $9. 12:30 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The People's Joker (2022)
Emagine Willow Creek
This brilliant, unauthorized comic trans twist on the DC Universe is almost sold out. $10. 4 p.m. More info here.
The Motive and the Cue
The Main
Live from the National Theatre. $20. 7 p.m. Wednesday encore: $14. 12:30 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Yep, they're showing the whole series. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Touch of Evil (1958)
Trylon
So much better than any movie where Charlton Heston plays a Mexican cop has any right to be. $8. 6:45 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, June 3
Batman (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
We've had so, so many Batmen since then. $10.74. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Despicable Me (2010)
Alamo Drafthouse
How the Minionverse got started. Through Wednesday. $5.37. 10 a.m. More info here.
The Exorcist (Original Theatrical Cut) (1973)
Emagine Willow Creek
The thing you forget is, the first half hour or so is just Max von Sydow wandering around in the desert for some reason. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Wolves in 7. Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 4
Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
The movie that taught me never to leave a hat on a bed. $7.52. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
"A 2019 Pew Research Study unveiled a concerning reality: Only one-third of practicing U.S. Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist." What's even the point of being Catholic if you don't believe the super-crazy magical science stuff? Are you just in it for the guilt and the tedium? $16.26. 4 & 7 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Naz Reid. Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 5
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
2015 wasn't like this at all! $10.74. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of Desert (1994)
Grandview 1&2
George Miller's next Mad Max should have drag queens. $12. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Paris Is Burning (1990)
The Main
Absolutely essential document of the late '80s New York drag scene. $7. 4 & 7 p.m. More info here.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
The Parkway
There's a reason you know every joke in this movie by heart—they're funny! $9/$12. Pre-show music from Cindy Lawson at 7. Movie at 8. More info here.
Tape Freaks June
Trylon
Another Tape Freaks already? The months just fly by, huh? $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
The Dead Don't Hurt
Viggo Mortensson directs a western.
Deer Camp '86
Six hunters from Detroit are stalked by an ancient spirit.
Ezra
A standup comic has an autistic son. Are they gonna learn a little bit about themselves on a road trip? Oh, you better believe it.
Haikyuu!! THE MOVIE: Decisive Battle at the Garbage Dump
Title says it all, really.
In a Violent Nature
I've heard it called "an ambient slasher movie," and now I'm curious.
Songs of Earth
Filmmaker Margreth Olin’s father guides her through the beautiful sights of Western Norway.
Summer Camp
Three sleepaway camp friends reunite decades later. Sounds unduly heartwarming.
Young Woman and the Sea
The story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Back to Black
Not the exploitative disaster some are calling it, or at least no more exploitative a disaster than most music biopics. Yet even if the genuinely insightful documentary Amy from 2015 didn’t exist to make any dramatization of Amy Winehouse’s life feel redundant, extracting a recognizably human story from an almost too perfect cautionary tale of fame without surrendering to cliché would require a real gift. It’s certainly beyond the director Sam Taylor-Johnson (whose takes on sex and drugs you can sample in her adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey and A Million Little Pieces) or specialist in biopic screenplays Matthew Greenhalgh. (The movie literally shows us a caged bird singing, and more than once.) Marisa Abela is a lively screen presence who deserves to do more than impersonate a dead icon and mouth platitudes. As Winehouse’s on-and-off husband and lover Blake Fielder-Civil, Jack O'Connell offers an adult rehash of his Skins character, Eddie Marsen looks dazed throughout as Winehouse’s dad, and every time I see Lesley Manville (Amy’s beloved Nan here) I’m reminded what a crime it is that Mike Leigh can’t get financing for his films. Carefully sidestepping the issue of how complicit Fielder-Civil and those around Winehouse were in enabling her addiction, the film ends with Amy, sober and alone and a multiple Grammy winner, as though this momentary resolution somehow allows us to ignore what happened next. C+
Challengers (read the full review here)
Mildly pervy Euro auteur Luca Guadagnino has concocted a sort of Jules et Jim for les enfants de TikTok et PRIME sports drinks, with Zendaya as the apex of a love triangle who reveals that the other two points—scurfy Josh O’Connor and submissive Mike Faist—also have the hots for each other. What Guadagnino gets about Zendaya is that she excels as an observer, a judgmental force that doubles as a relatable audience surrogate. If there’s something of the fashion model’s posture to her confidence, and a flatness to her characterization—she’s all impulse and response—Challengers allows us to postpone any hard questions about development as an actor because its pleasures are all so wonderfully superficial. You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it. Why in my day, we had to go to grad school, study Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and learn to read homosocial desire into seemingly “straight” fictions. What once was subtext is now reflected vividly in Zendaya’s shades. B+
Civil War
Alex Garland’s alt-history war flick is a very easy movie to pretend to think about, and the crosscurrent of opinions has proven once again that people are very bad at watching movies—are maybe not even sure why they watch movies to begin with. I’m sure you know the set up: The U.S. has splintered into four warring factions, and we’re not told why. (The absolute lack of world-building is an overdue slap in the face to loremongers and Vox explainer culture.) Kirsten Dunst is Lee Smith, a legendary photojournalist undergoing a crisis of conscience; Cailee Spaeny (so fresh-faced she looks like she cut chem lab to be there) is the young wannabe who latches onto her. Together they trek to D.C., hoping to arrive before it falls to insurgents, and they experience a string of Apocalypse Now-style episodic grotesqueries along the way. Like most modern war movies, Civil War thinks it’ll disabuse us of our romantic notions of battle; like most successful war movies, it works as entertainment rather than ethical treatise. We don’t want rocket launchers actually fired into the Lincoln Memorial any more than we actually want Tokyo to be flattened by giant lizards or teenage girls to be butchered by psychopaths. We want images of our anxieties and desires displayed in a context where we’re free of the moral obligation to decide which are the anxieties and which are the desires, because what’s happening is “just a movie.” Civil War is a film rightly distrustful of the power of images that nonetheless relies on the considerable power of its own images to work. Fortunately, nobody has ever said horror movies had to be ideologically coherent. A-
Dune: Part 2 (read the full review here)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was a well-crafted slog, occasionally spectacular but often merely studently, as the director seemed intent to prove that he deserved the assignment. But with all the power players set in place, Part Two does an awful lot right. Villeneuve distills the essence of the novel’s currents of deception and misdirection into a legible screenplay while generating some truly uncanny moments. And as Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet shows us a man who makes a pragmatic decision to exploit the dogmatism of his followers because he believes that every other choice will cause more death and destruction, or who at least rationalizes his motives that way. With IP-recycling now the culture industry’s standard cannibalistic practice, Villeneuve, like Paul, imagines himself the good guy in this scenario, respectful of the traditions placed in his care rather than merely exploitative. But also like Paul there are forces at play beyond his control. So what happens when Villeneuve’s hero threatens to become a butcher? Stay tuned (Duned?) for Part 3. B+
The Fall Guy
David Leitch’s latest collection of bad quips and big booms isn’t quite the headache that Bullet Train was. But it is the kind of movie where we’re told that a dog will bite a guy in the nuts on command, and then two minutes later the dog bites a guy in the nuts on command, and then the audience claps with glee. And it’s also one of those behind-the-scenes “love letters to the movies” that makes you wish everyone involved loved movies just a little less. There are some fine over-the-top stunts and action sequences, but Leitch often undercuts them with rampant too-muchness—why set Ryan Gosling’s fight with goons on a flatbed truck to Emily Blunt singing “Against All Odds” at karaoke, and then cut back and forth between the two? Gosling and Blunt do have some chemistry, as two attractive people with acting skills will, but He’s Just Ken was clearly over-rewarded with praise last year. If he coasts on his tics (that smirk ‘n’ gaze, those quick, clipped replies) for the rest of his career, Barbie will have a lot to answer for. C+
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Prequels, to use a technical cinematic term, suck. But if Origins of Furiosa is the movie George Miller has to make in order to shred more dudes underneath the wheels of a giant truck in a desert, who's gonna complain? Anya Taylor-Joy is winningly stoic as the title character, Alyla Browne even better as her even younger self, and Tom Burke (the posh junkie from Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir) is gallant as somebody named Praetorian Jack. As for Chris Hemsworth, still making good use of his freakishly enhanced Asgardian physique, he gets a few too many bits of scenery caught in his teeth as he chomps his way through the wasteland, but that's part of the fun. Worth it alone for the War Rig battle, the kind of sequence literally no other director would even think to film even if they knew how. A-
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
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-
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+
