Looking forward to Once Upon a Time in Harlem, David Greaves's restoration of the footage his father William shot of assembled Harlem Renaissance luminaries in 1972. I may also finally catch up with Wicker, though it can't possibly match this woman's experience. Below, I reviewed La Bola Negra.
Special Screenings
Thursday, November 12
Ratatouille (2007)
Granada Theater
A Taste the Movies event. This meal better be prepared by an actual rat. $169. 7 p.m. More info here.
Blood Simple (1984)
Grandview 1&2
The Coens start their career with a bang. $13.19. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Fatherland (2026)
Main Cinema
Thomas Mann drives across postwar Germany with his daughter. $13. 7:10 p.m. More info here.
Friday, November 13
Ernie & Emma (2026)
Alamo Drafthouse
Bruce Campbell brings his latest to town. Well, to Woodbury. Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Over the Garden Wall (2014)
TriLingua Cinema
All 10 episodes of the Comedy Central toon. $5. 5:40 & 8:05 p.m. More info here.
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Trylon
Montgomery Clift was one good-looking son-of-a-bitch. $8. 7 & 9:15 p.m. Saturday 9:15 p.m. Sunday 3:30 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, November 14
The Searchers (1956)
Alamo Drafthouse
“When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit.” $10.99. Noon. More info here.
Carmen: Encore
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Lagoon Cinema/Marcus West End
The classic Bizet opera, from the Met. 1 p.m. Prices and more info here.
Festive Fun With Peppa (2026)
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Merry Pigsmas. AMC: $11.69. 10:30 a.m. More info here. Marcus: $9.25. Saturday-Sunday noon. Monday-Tuesday 10 a.m. More info here.
League Of Legends Worlds 26 - Finals In Cinema
AMC Southdale 16
If you say so! $25. 1 p.m. More info here.
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Heights Theater
The Heights’ river-themed series kicks off with cartoon Moses. $6-$13. 11 a.m. More info here.
The Warriors (1979)
Heights Theater
Gangs should be more like this imo. $10/$13. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
The Gold Rush (1925)
Howard Conn Fine Arts Center
Prepare for winter with this Chaplin classic. Presented by Cinema Ecclesia. $12.50. 10:30 a.m. More info here.
Behemoth! (2026)
Main Cinema
Pedro Pascal learned to play cello for this. Free for MSP Film Society members. 11 a.m. More info here.
Being Heumann (2026)
Main Cinema
The story of disability rights activist Judy Heumann. $13. 12:45 p.m. Monday 7:15 p.m. More info here.
The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
Marcus West End
The birds, they are so angry. $7. 1:50 p.m. Sunday 1:55 p.m. More info here.
The Last Dive (2025)
Riverview Theater
The story of a friendship between man and manta ray. $17.50. 10 a.m. Wednesday 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Away (2019)
TriLingua Cinema
From the director of Flow. $5. 4:05 p.m. More info here.
Dear You (2026)
TriLingua Cinema
The hit Chinese family drama. $5. 6:20 p.m. More info here.
Wild River (1960)
Trylon
Presented by podcaster Karina Longworth and very much sold out. $8. 4:30 & 7 p.m. Sunday 1 p.m. More info here.
Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924)
Walker Art Center
The irresistible lure of communism beguiles Martian royalty. Live soundtrack from pianist Katie Condon. $6/$8. 2 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, November 15
Wallace & Gromit: The Classic Shorts (1996)
Alamo Drafthouse
Knitting kit comes with the price of a ticket. $18. 1 p.m. More info here.
White Christmas (1954)
Emagine Willow Creek
It isn’t even Thanksgiving. Also Wednesday. $11. Noon & 7:15 p.m. More info here.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Grandview 1&2
Sex workers bring culture to a western mining town. Also Thursday. $13.19. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The River (1951)
Heights Theater
Jean Renoir heads to India. $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Parkway Theater
They made a sequel to Wonka? $6-$12. 1 p.m. More info here.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Trylon
Underrated Prince album. $8. 6 & 8 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, November 16
Dive in Wonderland (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
An anime take on Lewis Carroll. $14.69. 7 p.m. More info here.
Clue (1985)
Edina Mann
RIP Tim Curry. Also Wednesday. $10.90. 7 p.m. More info here.
Demonwarp (1988)
Emagine Willow Creek
Sasquatch from space? $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
WTF: Watch Terrible Films Club
56 Brewing
I don’t know what they’re gonna show, but I know it’s gonna be terrible. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Paradise in Harlem (2025)
FilmNorth
Six Points Theater co-presents this little-seen, all-Black film. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Heights Theater
Never heard of it. $10/$13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, November 17
Footprints on the Moon (1975)
Alamo Drafthouse
A woman is tormented by moon-related dreams of Klaus Kinski. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, November 18
Jeopardy! Interactive
Alamo Drafthouse
Again, not a movie. But it’s in a theater. $15. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Cobra (1986)
Emagine Willow Creek
“I play Cobra.” $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Apocalypse Now (The Final Cut) (1979)
Heights Theater
Is this the one with the French colonials? I can’t keep these versions straight. $10/$13. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Goodfellas (1990)
Lagoon Cinema
The best kind of fellas, if you ask me. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Parkway Drive: Home (2026)
Marcus West End
The metalcore band returns to Australia for a concert. $13. 7:20 p.m. More info here.
Friday (1995)
Parkway Theater
On a Wednesday? $10/$15. 8 p.m. More info here.
V-World: The Matrix (1999)
Trylon
I bet it’s better than the actual Matrix sequels. Presented by Trash Film Debauchery. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, November 19
Giant: The Play (2026)
Marcus West End
John Lithgow is Roald Dahl. $15.50. 7:50 p.m. More info here.
Footprints Over the Mekong (2026)
TriLingua Cinema
A new short from local filmmaker Cheng Xiong. Free. 7, 7:30, & 8 p.m. More info here.
Missing Reels: Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)
Trylon
There will be a live performance of the reel missing from this film. Sold out. 7 p.m. More info here.
Critical Thresholds: Works by Leslie Thornton
Walker Art Center
A selection of the media artist’s work, focused on the interrelation between film and nuclear weapons. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Donga Naa Koduku
An Indian action comedy.
Dune (2021)
Back in theaters for obvious reasons.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
As is this one.
Ebenezer
About time someone made a movie of this book.
God With Us
“A modern-day faith-based drama and urban reimagining of the biblical Nativity story.”
How to Rob a Bank
This movie seems to stink of the internet.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Archival footage of Harlem Renaissance figures gathered together for discussion in 1972, finally released.
Victorian Psycho
A Victorian secretary steals $40,000 from her boss.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
La Bola Negra
Directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have confected a pretty movie about pretty people with the look and feel (and length) of an epic but lacking much of the heft. Three interlocking stories of gay Spanish men span nearly a century. The musician Guitarricadelafuente plays Sebastián Azcuna, an inept trumpeter who reluctantly joins the fascists after the Italians strafe his village during the Civil War; he falls for a prisoner named Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), a lover of Federico García Lorca, and is entrusted with a special literary mission. Eighty years later Sebastián’s grandson Alberto (Carlos González) receives an unlikely bequest from the old man, who has apparently just died at an actuarily unlikely age. And then there’s Carlos (Milo Quifes), a wealthy young gay man of the prewar era who, we learn, is the main character of the unfinished Lorca play that gives the film its title. So many components of La Bola Negra could be subtracted and the whole would still stand; not because those bits are dull, but because this is a tale of discrete sweeping gestures and set pieces. The film shakes its head at the few older characters who still harbor resentment about the war, which feels less like the defining cataclysm of 20th century Spain than a gripping backdrop for a straightforward liberatory arc: Sebastián is essentially the R2-D2 who will smuggle Lorca’s play into the future to blow up the Death Star of homophobia. As for the decision of the Javis and Alberto Conejero to finish Lorca’s play for him, well, that really takes some bolas. B
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, as writer/director Noah Segan takes ostentatious pains to remind us throughout the nonetheless endearing character study. John Turturro is the titular thief, an easygoing Bronx elder who cares attentively for his comatose wife, plies his trade while causing as few waves as he can, and smooths over any rough patches by slipping you a few high-denomination bills. But then he robs the wrong target (a highly connected jerkoff played to the douchey hilt by Will Price) and, well, you know how that goes. Hey, did you know that New York is the greatest city in the world? And did you know it used to be so much better? From its thirdhand soundtrack funk score to its broad borough-by-borough characterizations to its cute oldguyisms (they say “Esty” for “Etsy” etc.), this movie lays it on t-h-i-c-k. Is there Steve Buscemi? You know it, bud. But Turturro’s presence holds it together; he’s just one our greatest onscreen hangs, somehow a more calming presence the more evidently he’s masking his melancholy. And I can’t help but cherish the moments of screentime he shares with Giancarlo Esposito, who plays his onetime foe and now ally in the police department. You really expect me not feel a certain way at the sight of an aged Buggin’ Out and Pino Frangione seated calmly side by side on a subway? B
Resident Evil
If video game movies we must have (not like we get to decide) better this gory schlock slapstick than the klutz existentialism of the tedious Exit 8. (Both share a plot point—pregnant girlfriend—if that means anything.) Zach Cregger keeps it simpler here than in Barbarian or Weapons, which means Resident Evil is a little dumber than those (derogatory) but also means Resident Evil is a little dumber than those (complimentary). Austin Abrams (the addict from Weapons) is our dumbass hero, a driver dispatched with a high-priority delivery to the hospital in snowy Raccoon City. His cargo, I sincerely hope you won’t be astounded to learn, is the crucial ingredient needed to synthesize an antidote to a man-made contagion sweeping the land. Symptoms typically include zombie catatonia, grasping tentacles, and blob-like absorption of other humans, but there are also acid-puking ghoulies and one tubby fella with an exploding, critter-infested gut. The script could occasionally try a tiny bit harder (how much Abrams muttering “fuck” do we need?) but in a world of forced MCU quippery that’s a venial sin. And in keeping with the source material, the stakes are both enormous (the end of the world!) and virtually negligible (game over). B
Sense and Sensibility
We can debate our preferred Pride and Prejudice or wonder why no Emma has surpassed Clueless, but for most people Ang Lee’s 1995 film is Sense and Sensibility. Director Georgia Oakley’s damp, darkened, lived-in Jane Austen faces this challenge head-on—perhaps too deliberately—battling our memories of sun-dappled landscapes and cute bonnets with a lowkey naturalism. Tossed out of their home by an elder half-brother after their father’s death, the Dashwood sisters set about finding husbands, as Austen heroines must do. The elder Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is constrained in her relations with her beloved Edward (George Mackay, putting his woodenness to good use) by her good sense, while a romantic sensibility allows the younger Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) to be swept away by the dashing Willoughby (a suitably caddish Frank Dillane). Edgar-Jones has a face made for period pieces, but there’s something inappropriately waifish and younger sisterly about her Elinor, and she struggles to achieve an outward representation of her propriety. Creed-Miles fares better, in part because Oakley favors her sensibility to Elinor’s sense—I often felt the director might prefer to be mucking around in something a little more Brontëan. In fact, this affair can feel unduly heavy when Fiona Shaw’s Mrs. Jennings isn’t around to liven things up, but we do get a real warmth between the sisters, and the two dance scenes are such standouts Oakley really should do a musical next. In short, no one gets in the way of the source material, and the film gets the job done. After all, how many truly terrible Austen adaptations that don’t star Dakota Johnson are there? B
Wild Horse Nine
It’s 1973 and a rheumy, cadaverous, yet jaunty skull of a man, dressed gaudy and inescapably American, taunts two pretty young Chilean leftists in an airport, predicting the worst for their beloved new Marxist president. Later in the film, Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) will share even grimmer visions of Salvador Allende’s fate—he’s a CIA lifer who helped take out Lumumba in the DRC and Árbenz in Guatemala before that, even JFK back home, and he knows how this shit plays out. In addition to blurting out coup details, Chris is also increasingly forgetful and working on a tell-all memoir, upsetting his boss (Steve Buscemi again, looking here like a stateside Gary Oldman), and his partner/buddy Lee (Sam Rockwell, squinting in a My Name Is Earl daze and saying “fuck” a lot). Chris and Lee travel to “Easter Island” to see “the big heads”—or rather, Rapa Nui to see the Moai, as the culturally sensitive keep reminding them—bantering for banter’s sake all the while. So yeah, it’s a Martin McDonagh movie, convinced as ever that the more men obfuscate through digression and anecdote and overall verbal irrelevancies the more they reveal about their relationships with each other. But though Malkovich gives it his all, this time I’m not so sure. For starters, fuck the CIA. We’ve all fallen for onscreen scumbags in the past, but McDonagh forgets to make these guys intriguing enough that we overlook how reprehensible they are. It’s like he thinks that the fact that they’re speaking the lines he wrote for them is enough to make us care. Like hell it is. Rapa Nui does look gorgeous though. B-
Wildwood
Sometimes a lovingly handcrafted fantasy epic is just a lovingly handcrafted fantasy epic. Gifted minor cause célèbre status by the AI backlash, the latest (forgivably CG-tweaked) spectacle from the stop-motion aesthetes at Laika has some critics complaining about about a lack of cultural resonance, but hell, I’ll take any respite from the Pixar ideology factory, thank you kindly. After her brother Mac is carried off to the Unpassable Woods by a murder of crows (that can’t be good, right?), a headstrong girl named Prue ventures in after him, trailed by a nerdy RPG pest named Curtis (whose redemption arc was honestly the biggest drag on the movie for me). There Prue encounters as many stalemated factions as Europe in 1914: snooty bureaucrats, disinterested mystics, good-hearted bandits, and several subsets of birds. Trouble’s a-brewin’ in the person of the Dowager Governess Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan, who hasn’t been this good since An Education), who has mustered a coyote army and hopes to resurrect her dead son. A startling mood-setting opening, a cute biker’s-eye tour of twee Portlandia, and a brutal climactic battle where you can see every blow land stand out strongly enough that you can drift along with the meandering plot. Adapted from lead Decemberist Colin Meloy’s children’s book, it’s your basic storytime stuff—learning that adults are flawed, finding the courage to fight for what you believe in, getting help from a talking rat—but when the visuals are this cool, maybe that’s enough. A-
You Can See Everything
Do Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim provide insight into the opaque mens rea of luminous fraudster Elizabeth Holmes? Does their film “speak … uncannily to the pathos and destabilizing confusions of the present moment”? Is it “a secret history of the tech industry”? To quote the great philosopher Lou Costello, “I! DON’T! KNOW!” Before it’s timely or significant or groundbreaking or whatever superlative you want to hurl, You Can See Everything is fun, challenging us to keep our psychological balance as we’re consistently wrongfooted. Like all documentaries, You Can See Everything strives for a narrative that approximates the truth. And like all fiction,You Can See Everything revels in the pleasure of being duped. (We’re not the first moderns to endure an epistemic crisis, after all; let’s hope we’re not the last.) Yet it feels uniquely of its moment, in the way a great horror flick reflects our most persistent fears in titillating ways. Fielder (or “Fielder”) plays the skeptic or dupe as the story requires, his increasing obsession with what Holmes is “really” thinking a synecdoche for our collective fascination with the unknowable about celebrities. Here’s proof that you can have a real-world parasocial relationship, and for once I understand the pleasure that rubberneckers must derive from true-crime podcasts. Fielder is Odysseus strapped to the mast as he sails past the sirens, taking a long gaze into an abyss that stares back into him with impossibly enormous blue irises, and he learns nothing—except maybe that you can never trust a guy who consumes YouTube at 2x speed. But you already knew that, right? A
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother—ends November 12
It’s a surefire plot: a big tough guy is tasked with caring for an infant. Yet Mahershala Ali and director Bassam Tariq, reuniting after fleeing Disney’s fumbled Blade reboot, don’t play this dilemma for laughs. Ali’s Latif is a devout Muslim and a hitman who has struck a fragile ethical balance that allows him to reconcile these roles. When his wife dies, and the refrigerated breast milk is gone, Latif frantically searches for a way to feed his formula-allergic infant, while also caring for a teen daughter (terrific newcomer Adia) with a nascent furry streak (“That squirrel porn nonsense is clouding your heart,” he tells her) and a son (Jahleel Kamara) who’s developing an unsettling taste for first-person shooters and Rambo movies. To top it off, Latif is tasked with protecting his boss’s skeevy, worthless son (a thoroughly reprehensible Abubakr Ali) from a self-righteous Christian cult leader (John Cho, with a grill) who suspects the sleazeball of child trafficking. Latif considers himself a protector, but as his job increasingly endangers his family, he doubts his uprightness. DP Katelin Arizmendi exploits the film’s digital sheen, moving us through a grimy Houston and brilliantly capturing the varied palettes of Black faces with extreme close ups. And Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is the rare American film that takes faith seriously. Most that pretend to (Angel Studios schlock, say) fashion it into a sentimental weapon of self-righteousness, but the world of Latif’s mosque feels like a real place filled with real people. Oh, and the action scenes do kick ass. A-
