Feelin' ornery this week, so many take my reviews below of The Life of Chuck and 28 Years Later with a grain of salt. Or maybe those movies are part of the reason I'm feeling ornery.
Special Screenings
Thursday, June 19
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile (2022)
Alamo Drafthouse
Shawn Mendes singing Pasek and Paul songs? Sometimes it’s good not to have kids. $7. 11:45 p.m. Monday-Wednesday 12 p.m. More info here.
Critical Role Live: Tag Team at the Teeth | The Misty Ascent
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Sorry, not a clue. $27.26. 7 p.m. More info here.
40 Acres (2025)
AMC Southdale 16
An advance screening of the new post-apocalyptic thriller. $7. 5 p.m. More info here.
Videodrome (1983)
Emagine Willow Creek
James Woods’s gut turns into a vagina. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Carol (2015)
Grandview 1&2
Rooney Mara will be playing mousy young women into her 60s. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Odd Couple (1968)
The Heights
Team Oscar. $13.75. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Riverview Theater
Remember this classic Racket essay. $1. 10 a.m. More info here.
Friday, June 20
Sonic 3 (2024)
Bohanon Park
*Tina Weymouth voice* Bohanon, Bohanon, Bohanon, Bohanon. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
The Garfield Movie (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
As voiced by Minnesota’s own Chris Pratt. Through Wednesday. $3. 11 a.m. More info here.
The Shining (1980)
Riverview Theater
Never marry a writer. $5. 9:40 p.m. More info here.
Morgan: Killer Doll (2025)
Trylon
OK, this may be the best copyright-skirting knockoff yet. $8. Friday, Sunday 1 p.m. Saturday, Wednesday 10 a.m. Monday-Tuesday 1 p.m. More info here.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Trylon
This movie makes evil seem so damn cool. $8. Friday-Saturday, Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:30 p.m. Sunday 3, 5:30 & 8 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, June 21
Midsommer (2019)
Alamo Drafthouse
Florence Pugh has a bad boyfriend. $8.95. 2:45 p.m. More info here.
Crooklyn (1994)
East Side Sculpture Park
Maybe Spike Lee’s most personal film. Free. 9:25 p.m. More info here.
Finding Nemo (2003)
Granada
A “Taste the Movies” event. Are they really going to serve fish? $159–$169. 6 p.m. More info here.
Barbie (2023)
Lake Harriet Bandshell
Never heard of it. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 22
The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Tiny Borrower Arrietty meets a full-sized human boy. Through Tuesday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Emagine Willow Creek
Why yes, it is Pride month. $11.60. 2 p.m. More info here.
Top Gun (1986)
Emagine Willow Creek
But who is the bottom gun? Also Wednesday. $10.60. 3:30 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Dinner in America (2020)
Grandview 1&2
On its way to becoming a cult hit, I'm told. $14.44. 6:45 p.m. More info here.
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Grandview 1&2
A good one. Full review here. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Footloose Widows (1926)
The Heights
Two gals head to Florida looking to land rich husbands. With live Wurlitzer accompaniment by Ed Copeland. $20. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Monday, June 23
The Hunger (1983)
Alamo Drafthouse
Vampires are the lesbians of the undead. $8.95. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
House (1985)
Emagine Willow Creek
What a cast! William Katt! George Wendt! Richard Moll! $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Monsters, Inc (2001)
Van Cleve Park
“What if your child’s imagination was actually a corporation?” is such a Pixar question. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 24
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Alamo Drafthouse
Starring Ed and Nadine of Twin Peaks. $8.95. 9 p.m. More info here.
Catacomb Cinema Club
Bryant Lake Bowl
Scary trivia and a scarier movie. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Inside Out 2 (2024)
Lyndale Farmstead Park
“What if your child’s brain was actually an office staffed with project managers jockeying for control of her emotional responses?” is also such a Pixar question. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 25
F1 (2025)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening of the new race car movie. Vroom. $15.45. 7 p.m. More info here.
Frankenhooker (1990)
Alamo Drafthouse
If you made this movie today, it’d have to be called Frankensexworker, amirite? Where’s my Netflix special? $8.95. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Critical Role Live: Tag Team at the Teeth | Beyond the Shroud
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Still no clue. $27.26. 7 p.m. More info here.
Barbie (2023)
The Commons
If you can’t make it over to Lake Harriet. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)
Emagine Willow Creek
Notoriously awful Norman Mailer noir. $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Sing 2 (2021)
Riverview Theater
Singing cartoon animals. Also Wednesday. $1. 10 a.m. More info here.
Cult Film Collective Secret 16mm Show
Trylon
“An incredibly rare short film and one of the all-time great making-of documentaries”—both Star Wars-related, it seems. $8. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bride Hard
Rebel Wilson is a maid of honor—and a secret agent!
Brokeback Mountain
Back in theaters for the 20th anniversary.
8 Vasanthalu
An Indian coming-of-age romantic drama.
Elio
The true story of the world’s worst frozen pizza.
Kuberaa
An Indian crime drama.
28 Years Later
Maybe I was just in a shitty mood (though I don’t remember being in one when I walked into the theater) but this Danny Boyle/Alex Garland reunion irritated the hell out of me. Could be Boyle’s affected jitter-glitch montage style, the aesthetic equivalent of a cheap jump scare, haphazardly splicing in newsreels, Olivier’s Henry V, and the music of Young Fathers, whose gritty beatcraft I generally appreciate on its own. Or could be that I resent films where characters plunge nonsensically into danger for reasons I’m supposed to consider noble. Along the way, you get Ralph Fiennes as a cuddlier Col. Kurtz, “alpha” zombies who pluck spinal cords out by the head (pretty cool), Jodie Comer adding another accent to her CV, and a newborn baby to symbolize how life overcomes death or whatever. “Pretentious” is generally a lazy insult for dummies, but what else do you call it when a film makes such a show of insisting it has achieved technical feats and reached emotional truths that remain far beyond its grasp? C+
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Ballerina
The full official title is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, but it’s not my job to do PR for yet another IP extension that flails around for two hours in search of a reason for existing. I’ll admit, many of the action sequences (grenades! flamethrowers! kitchen utensils!) are more imaginative than I’d expect from director Len Wiseman, best known as Kate Beckinsale’s ex-husband and second-best known as the auteur behind the Underworld vampire movies, which were essentially an excuse to ensconce Beckinsale in latex. (I mean, there are worse ideas.) Once we’ve trudged through tiresome exposition and Ana de Armas’s vengeful death-machine Eve makes it to a quiet mountain village where everyone turns out to be a killer, Ballerina approaches something like fun. But this is just not the right vehicle for de Armas. Keanu Reeves’s glum zen stoicism perfectly anchored the mayhem around him in the other Wick movies, but who would watch de Armas’s brief, delightfully glam turn in No Time to Die and prefer to see her trudging through rehashed lore as a dour assassin? And yes, Keanu does appear in Ballerina—though I’m not sure anyone told him he did. B-
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
Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye—ends Thursday
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-
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life—ends Thursday
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-
The Life of Chuck
Tom Hiddleston is one of many talented actors who profitably allowed the MCU to Thanos-snap away the prime of his career, and from the looks of The Life of Chuck he doesn’t seem like he’ll be back to doing quietly intense Joanna Hogg films anytime soon. In this razzle-dazzle puzzle of a heart-tugger he’s Chuck Krantz, a mysterious accountant who turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Once the film pulls the metaphysical rug out from under a resonantly apocalyptic first act, The Life of Chuck stacks the deck in the interests of life-affirming profundity so gratuitously you can tell it’s lying to itself. There’s a good reason I don’t turn to Stephen King for the profound or Mike Flanagan for the life-affirming (or vice versa). Though seeing both Mia Sara and Heather Langenkamp as old ladies certainly does confront the middle-aged among us with intimations of mortality, the inexorable passage of time, and all that jazz. C+
Materialists
Well now, someone finally figured out what to do with Dakota Johnson. As Lucy, a get-’em-girl NYC matchmaker, the self-possessed daze that Johnson inescapably floats around in makes an eerie sense—she’s a true believer in her product, convinced that data points can substitute for intangibles. Hell, I’d hand her my business card too. Her sales instinct attracts a wealthy suitor (Pedro Pascal) but she can’t shake an unprofitable attraction to her ex (an unglammed Chris Evans), an actor who does catering or vice versa. The first third bubbles along winningly, though things get predictably wobbly once Johnson has to impersonate a human. But as a Celine Song skeptic who considered the characterizations in Past Lives too vague, I’m surprised by how much speechifying the writer/director allows her love triangulators here: People haul off with monologues about who they truly are so often its like being trapped in a city solely populated by Crash Davises. I wish I could say you’ll be surprised who Lucy ends up with, but though Song eventually knocks the matchmaker’s rickety ideology out from under her, the film settles for romantic mystification rather than working toward some compromised realism. Am I saying Materialists is insufficiently dialectical? Not just that, comrades—it’s insufficiently materialist. B
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
The Phoenician Scheme
As a lukewarm Wes Anderson apologist, I take no joy in reporting that this chuckle-eliciting puzzle box is essentially the movie the dandy director’s haters accuse him of constantly remaking. Benicio del Toro is Zsa Zsa Korda, an apparently assassin-proof international power broker with a knack for wrangling slave labor and inciting famine. Following his latest near death encounter, Korda embarks on facilitating his final, most ambitious project, accompanied by his daughter and potential heir, a moonfaced and expressionless would-be novitiate named Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Thing is, all his backers want out, and he’s got to wrangle and manipulate a collection of terrific bit players (hearing Jeffery Wright recite Anderson/Coppola dialogue is always a pleasure) into ponying up the dough. Threapleton is a perfect match for Anderson’s schtick, and the zany final showdown between del Toro and a bewhiskered Benedict Cumberbatch should cap a much funnier movie. But a handful of pleasing moments don’t add up to much, and we get far more of Michael Cera’s dazed turtle expressions than anyone needs in 2025. 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-
