I mean, Friday the 13th is a holiday of sorts, right? Anyway, summer's all but officially here, and that means lots of cheap, air-conditioned or outdoors screenings for your spawn. Also, scroll down for my review of Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives, Materialists.
Special Screenings
Thursday, June 12
Scanners (1981)
Emagine Willow Creek
In high school, Dave Giuffre totally puked after watching the exploding head scene. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Happy Together (1997)
Grandview 1&2
Wong Kar-wai follows the path of a fraught relationship between two men. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Out-of-Towners (1970)
Heights Theater
Hey, did you read our recent celebration of the Heights? $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Land Before Time (1988)
Riverview Theater
A little herbivore’s big adventure. $1. 10:30 a.m. More info here.
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Riverview Theater
In the morning for the kids, late night for the nerds. $5. 9:20 p.m. Friday 11:35 p.m. Saturday 9:30 a.m. & 11:35 p.m. Saturday More info here.
The Virgin Spring (1960)
Trylon
Bleak Week ends, appropriately, with Bergman. $8. 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Wonka (2023)
Victory Memorial Drive
The prequel nobody asked for. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Friday, June 13
Friday the 13th (1980)
Alamo Drafthouse/AMC Southdale 16
For obvious reasons. Alamo: $11.95. 10 p.m. More info here. AMC: $9.19. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Star Wars (1977)
Trylon
Never heard of it. $8. Friday-Saturday, Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:30 p.m Sunday 3, 5:30, & 8 p.m. More info here.
A Disaster (2025)
Walker Art Center
Using almost no images, Alison O'Daniel creates a soundtrack from disaster movies. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, June 14
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Julian Glover does one of the worst American accents ever here. Through Monday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
Asian Street Food Night Market
Stephen Chow’s comic action spree is a great addition to a great event. Free. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Emagine Willow Creek
Based on the beloved Atari 2600 video game. Also Sunday & Wednesday. $10.60. 3:15 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Assembly (2025)
Main Cinema
A NYC armory is transformed into an inclusive artists’ space. $11 or free for Film Society members. 11 a.m. More info here.
The Last Wave (1977)
Walker Art Center
Peter Weir reimagines colonialism as disaster movie. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, June 15
The Birdcage (1996)
Alamo Drafthouse
Can Robin Williams pretend to be straight? $10. 12 p.m. More info here.
Appropriate Behavior (2014)
Emagine Willow Creek
A Persian-American in Brooklyn hides her bisexuality from her family. $11.60. 2 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.
Monday, June 16
The Garfield Movie (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
Weird choice to make an animated biopic about the 20th President of the United States, but I’m intrigued. Through Wednesday. $7. 12 noon. More info here.
Knife + Heart (2018)
Alamo Drafthouse
“The queer neo-giallo of your dreams,” Alamo raves. $10. 10:30 p.m. More info here.
Showgirls (1995)
Alamo Drafthouse
Classic? Trash? Trash classic? Second-tier Verhoeven? You decide! $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Finding Faith (Healed by Jesus) (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
You know who never had to blurb shitty Fathom Entertainment movies? $13.94. 7 p.m. More info here.
Waxwork (1988)
Emagine Willow Creek
Gotta stay away from wax museums, kids. $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The Heights
This screening is sold out, but there’s another next month. Act now! $16. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Cool Runnings (1993)
Sumner Field Park
Hard to convey three decades later just how obsessed the world was with the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, June 17
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Alamo Drafthouse
Low-budget art horror wasn’t exactly born here, but it’s tempting to say so anyway. $8.95. 9 p.m. More info here.
The Birdcage (1996)
Parkway Theater
If’n you don’t feel like driving out to Woodbury. $10/$12. Burlesque with Queenie von Curves at 7:30 p.m. Screening at 8 p.m. More info here.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Riverview Theater
Remember this classic Racket essay. Through Wednesday. $1. 10 a.m. More info here.
IF (2024)
St. Anthony Park
From the mind of John Krasinski (derogatory). Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, June 18
Black Panther (2018)
The Commons
RIP Chadwick Boseman. Free. 9:05 p.m. More info here.
Carol (2015)
Edina Mann
If’n you don’t feel like going to St. Paul. $14.44. 7 p.m. More info here.
Mars Attacks! (1996)
Emagine Willow Creek
A benefit for Herbivorous Butcher. $12.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Skyscraper (1996)
Trylon
Anna Nicole Smith’s version of Die Hard. But is it a Christmas movie? $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
How to Train Your Dragon
Again, not “live action” unless there’s a guy in a dragon suit. Or a real dragon.
The Life of Chuck
Happy to see Tom Hiddleston finally free of the MCU, but I'm concerned that this much-praised movie will try to make me "feel good."
Prime Minister
A biopic about New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. No, really.
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
The Unholy Trinity
Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson team up for a Western.
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
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
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-
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-
