Out of this week's new releases, I'm curious about the new horror film Leviticus, less so by yet another Toy Story. And if you scroll down you'll find new reviews of The Furious and Power Ballad.
Special Screenings
Thursday, June 18
But I’m a Cheerleader (2000)
Alamo Drafthouse
Sure is Pride month. $20. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
GOAT (2026)
Creekview Park
A small goat aspires to professional sports. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Breaking Glass (1980)
Emagine Willow Creek
The rise of a fictional female British punk rocker. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Grandview 1&2
Ah, the good old days of porn. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Charlie the Wonderdog (2026)
Marcus West End
Owen Wilson is a dog with superpowers. The dog's voice, anyway. $3. 11:30 a.m. More info here.
KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
Marcus West End
Gonna be screening a lot this summer. $6. 1:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday 1:50 p.m. More info here.
The Lost Boys (1987)
Riverview Theater
Get yer sexy shirtless vampire saxophone here. Through Saturday. $7. 9 p.m. More info here.
Friday, June 19
Force Majeure (2014)
Alamo Drafthouse
Back when Ruben Östlund really seemed on to something. $10.99. 7 p.m. More info here.
I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
Alamo Drafthouse
James Baldwin, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. $10.99. 4 p.m. More info here.
Paddington in Peru (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
What’s he doing there? $8. Friday, Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. Saturday-Sunday 10 a.m. More info here.
Jurassic Park (1993)
Granada
A Taste the Movies event. They’d better serve up some dinosaur. $169. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Heights Theater
You know, I’ve never seen it. $16. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Parkway Theater
A 25th anniversary screening, with an acoustic set from filmmaker/star John Cameron Mitchell. Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Linda Linda Linda (2005)
Trylon
Punk rock brings four high school girls together. $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 9 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)
Trylon
Diane Lane invented punk rock not England. $8. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:15 p.m. More info here
Saturday, June 20
Body Double (1984)
Alamo Drafthouse
De Palma at his sleaziest. $13.99. 9:45 p.m. More into here.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
Alamo Drafthouse
& Grogu. $10.99. 3:30 p.m. More info here.
Babe (1995)
Heights Theater
A pig that can herd sheep? Now I’ve seen everything! $13. 11 a.m. More info here.
Anything That Moves (2025)
Heights Theater
Presented by Vinegar Syndrome, which has just opened a store in Dinkytown. $16. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Parkway Theater
A 25th anniversary screening, with an acoustic set from filmmaker/star John Cameron Mitchell. Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sweet Land (2005)
Walker Art Center
Filmed in Minnesota, released 20 years ago. $20/$25. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 21
Aftersun (2022)
Alamo Drafthouse
Do you like to cry in the morning? $10.99. 11 a.m. More info here.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Alamo Drafthouse/AMC Southdale/Marcus West End
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the beloved Atari 2600 game. Alamo; $10.99. 2 p.m. More info here. AMC: $7. 1 p.m. More info here. Marcus: $9.25. 1 p.m. More info here.
Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Who doesn’t love a good heist? Also Wednesday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
Adolescence in Utena (1999)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Heights Theater
Anime about a prestigious academy and a mysterious girl. AMC: $15. 4 p.m. Monday 7 p.m. More info here. Heights: $13. 4:30 p.m. Monday 7 p.m. More info here.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Grandview 1&2
Not only hasn’t this David Denby review aged well, it was dumb at the time. Also Thursday. $14.14. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Show Boat (1936)
Heights Theater
Oool’ maaan riverrrr. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Interstellar (2014)
Lagoon Cinema
For those of you who like math in your blockbusters. $11. 2 p.m. Wednesday 4 & 7 p.m. More info here.
Buffalo Kids (2024)
Marcus West End
Won’t you come out tonight? $3. 10:45 p.m. Monday-Wednesday 11 p.m. Thursday 11:30 p.m. More info here.
The Birdcage (1996)
Roxxy’s Cabaret
Transmasc icon Robin Williams. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
The World’s End (2013)
Trylon
I know I saw this but I can’t for the life of me remember a damn thing about it! $8. 7:15 pm. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, June 22
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Alamo Drafthouse
Bend that gender, Joan. $13.99. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
AMC Screen Unseen
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A secret new movie! $7. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sing (2016)
Edina 4
Sometimes I’m glad I never had kids. Also Wednesday. $4.53. 10 a.m. More info here.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Edina 4
If you’d rather watch it in Edina. Also Wednesday. $12.12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Basket Case (1982)
Emagine Willow Creek
A detached conjoined twin goes on a rampage. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 23
Office Killer (1997)
Alamo Drafthouse
Yes, Cindy Sherman made a horror movie. 8 p.m. Prices and more info here.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Main Cinema
I always think of it as a kinder Barton Fink. Presented by Sloppy Discs. $11. 7 p.m. More info here.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Powderhorn Park
Terrify your children. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Riverview Theater
The live-action version. Through Thursday. $2. 10 a.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 24
Jeopardy! Interactive
Alamo Drafthouse
Play Jeopardy in the theater. $13.50. 7 p.m. More info here.
Maddie’s Secret (2026)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening and livestream Q&A with director John Early. $13.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
The Commons
A big ol’ outdoor singalong. Free. Sunset. More info here.
Ricochet (1991)
Emagine Willow Creek
Denzel vs. Lithgow! $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Queer Cinema for Palestine
Main Cinema
A selection of short films. $11. 7 p.m. More info here.
Jack Johnson: Surfilmusic (2026)
Marcus West End
Always thought his White Stripes cover was cute. $13. 4:15 p.m. More info here.
Cult Film Collective Secret 35mm Show
Trylon
“A long dismissed 1980s superhero ‘blockbuster.’” $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, June 25
Times Square (1980)
Emagine Willow Creek
Teen runaways become punks in NYC. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Hoppers (2026)
North Loop Green
What if you could be a robot beaver. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Kinky Boots (2005)
Parkway Theater
A struggling shoe factory learns that sex sells. $9/$12. Pre-show burlesque from Queenie Von Curves at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Bad Guys 2 (2025)
Webber Park
*Billie Eilish voice* Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
The Death of Robin Hood
Gritty Robin Hood reboot, I guess.
Girls Like Girls
And why wouldn’t they?
Hell Trotter
A Vietnamese horror film.
Leviticus
Gay teens face supernatural homophobia.
Maa Inti Bangaram
An Indian action film.
Toy Story 5
That’s too many toy stories.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.f
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act—ends June 18
Backrooms
More film-studenty than anyone impressed at director Kane Parsons’s tender age of 20 wants to let on, this unexpected budget horror hit is ambiguous enough for us all to project our own sense of entrapment on its unrelentingly yellow liminal space. Postmodern capital, the male psyche, miscellaneous trauma, the internet—whatever’s recursively hemming you in, we all feel lost within some labyrinth right now, and much credit to Parsons for tapping into that timely sensibility. But movies, pesky damn things, will have characters, and stories, and dialogue, and, well… Chiwetel Ejiofor (as an extremely divorced furniture store owner) and Renate Reinsve (as a therapist I personally would not recommend) do what they can with some leaden dialogue by Will Soodik, who does not have youth and inexperience as an excuse. Doesn’t help that Parsons ratchets up the drama whenever a bit of the ol’ flattened affect would accentuate the eerieness. Backrooms is an A minus haunted house padded out into a B minus movie, so let’s just say… B
Disclosure Day
In this movie we believe aliens exist, empathy is strength, TV brings people together, truth wins out in the end, some kind of vague god-related thing—I’m sorry, but what are we doing here? Spielbergologists will no doubt thematically connect this latest, closest encounter with the extraterrestrial to his past work in ways that are meaningful to them, but for this skeptical admirer it was two-plus hours of drab auteurist tics livened occasionally by technical feats no other living (or maybe dead) director could execute. Plotwise, former cybersecurity wiz Josh O’Connor has the proof of a government/corporate coverup, and he’s ready to tell the world. He’s somehow linked with Emily Blunt, a weather gal for a Kansas City TV station who’s gifted with mystical abilities by ETs. Both leads are swell, even if Blunt’s attempts at naïveté aren’t wholly convincing and O’Connor can’t always summon enough shades of earnest to avoid monotony, But Colin Firth and Coleman Domingo, as rival spymasters of sorts, find no pleasure in their roles, and Eve Hewson, as O’Connor’s girlfriend, a former novitiate, dispenses religious doubts with a sense of obligation that shortchanges both spirituality and science—and hell, fantasy as well. And then there’s the finale. Ultimately, your view of Disclosure Day may come down to whether you find Spielberg’s nostalgic faith in the transformative power of mass spectacle touching or deluded—or, let’s face it, self-aggrandizing. B-
The Furious
If you judge a martial arts movie by how many "remember that part where?"s come up in conversation afterwards (and what better measure is there?), Kenji Tanigaki’s ingenious and gory slugfest really racks 'em up. This review could easily degenerate into just a list of those moments if I didn’t want to give too much away, so let me just mention as a for instance the scene where one attacker has a knife at the throat of our hero—who’s resting on the back of another guy who has a knife at the throat over our other hero. The plot, for better or for worse, concerns a mysterious, mute handyman (Xie Miao) and an investigative journalist (Joe Taslim) whose daughter (a spunky Yang Enyou, who gives as good as she gets) and wife (Jeeja Yanin), respectively, are kidnapped by child traffickers with connections to the upper echelons of society. Up to the rescue of the imprisoned tykes, Tanigaki serves up some inventive mayhem, but The Furious earns its name with the finale, which revs into fifth gear as the two good guys face off against three baddies (and I promise you won’t be able to guess which). Here’s the kind of fight choreography that makes you wonder why we settle for such flat, rote combat in so many action flicks. I mean, the damage that these gentlemen can do with their legs alone is astonishing. A-
I Love Boosters
Every time I see a movie with Keke Palmer or LaKeith Stanfield in it, I think about how much of our time directors waste by making movies without Keke Palmer or LaKeith Stanfield in them. In Boots Riley’s Seussian celebration of art, communism, and Oakland, Palmer’s Corvette is part of a crew of high-end shoplifters, along with Naomi Ackie’s Sade and Taylour Paige’s Mariah, who draw the ire of girlboss designer Christy Smith (Demi Moore). Aided by Poppy Liu as a Chinese factory worker, Eiza González as a dirtbag leftist, and a device powered by dialectical materialism, they struggle to forge a global, multi-racial, working-class alliance. The film’s design team, led by Everything Everywhere All at Once costumer/Tierra Whack collaborator Shirley Kuratais, is playing a game no one else even knows the rules of, and the whole shebang is funny as hell. Of course, if you slow down and try to puzzle it all out… wait, why are you doing that? If I have a better time at the movies this year, I’ll be a very lucky man indeed. As for Stanfield—I’m not gonna give it away, but he’s in this. Damn is he in this. A
Michael
This is the story of a sweetly eccentric young fellow who merely wants to collect exotic animals, visit children in hospitals, and share his incredible talents with the world. With the help of agent (and, incidentally, the film’s executive producer) John Branca (Miles Teller), our hero wriggles free of his abusive, domineering father (Colman Domingo) and embarks on his first solo tour in 1988, finally his own man—presumably it was all smooth sailing from there. A glitzy extended ad for the disgraced superstar’s estate, Michael follows in the footsteps of the modern music biopic not only as a form of brand management, but as a means of score-settling—from NWA to Elton John, every star wants to be a victim nowadays. Michael has a made-to-order villain in Jackson paterfamilias Joseph, but with his grotesque prosthetics and Nixonian hunched shoulders, Domingo is actually more cartoonish than Mike Myers is in his brief borscht-belt turn as CBS head Walter Yetnikoff. The lesson of Michael Jackson’s life is that the further you retreat into escapist fantasy the more inescapably your neuroses surface, and that plays out with his fandom: The more irreparably Jackson’s reputation is tarnished, the more his worshippers demand a portrait of a saint’s life. And so they get as lousy a movie as they deserve. Shout out to Janet Jackson, who refused to participate and therefore simply doesn’t exist in this Michaelverse. C
Obsession
I’ll say this for the “must see” horror flick of the summer—you should probably see it. Which is more than I say about most of the lukewarm bloodbaths (some of them not even Oz Perkins’s fault) that are regularly touted as the best thing to happen to the screen since the chainsaw. Michael Johnston’s Bear is so hapless he can’t acknowledge his crush on pal/co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) even when she asks him about it point blank. So, like so many doomed losers before him, he makes a magical wish for her love, an overturning of the natural order that goes wrong is ways both predictable and un-. Like any effective horror movie, there are all sorts of psychosexual subtexts you can tease out of this scenario—the (male) anxiety that true love is smothering, the (again male) desire to efface female personality—but though YouTube-weaned auteur Curry Barker has a genre-adept’s knack for pacing and execution, Obsession doesn’t have much conceptual play. But it also doesn’t give us the easy “slay girl” catharsis of, say, Companion, and what truly sets it apart is Navarrette’s committed performance of a woman trapped in a man’s fantasy. B+
Power Ballad
Paul Rudd is Rick Power, a never-was turned wedding-band singer in Ireland. Nick Jonas is Danny Wilson, an erstwhile boy-bander desperate to reach the next stage in his career. The two bond over one boozy night of jamming and co-writing and part on good terms; a while later Rick hears Danny singing his song—a career-reviving smash hit—over loudspeakers in a mall and it’s on. Writer/director John Carney is the kind of sentimentalist who prizes moments of connection over happy endings, and the early scenes are warm and believable, but Power Ballad loses its way amid Rick’s search for validation and Danny’s degeneration into a two-dimensional villain. I do believe the song (written by Carney collaborator Gary Clark, who was once—heh heh—in a pop band called Danny Wilson) could be a hit, but I don’t mean that as a compliment. After all, Carney is the same guy who spent a whole film trying to convince me that Glen Hansard was a great songwriter. And the more I think about it, the more it bothers me that this is about a guy named Power who writes a ballad. Anyway, the most interesting character here is Power’s teen daughter Aja (a perfect little in-joke of a name), who tells her dad, “Women don’t want love songs anymore.” He: “What do they want?” She: “Revenge.” B-
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
Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu
Tuner—ends June 18
