Some real gems screening this week: I can't recommend Sansho the Bailiff, Only Angels Have Wings, The Night of the Hunter, or Daughters of the Dust highly enough. And that's not even mentioning movies that don't need my recommendation at all, like Vertigo or Bringing Up Baby, or movies I want to see for the first time, like Carol Reed's The Man Between. Haven't you heard? We're living in the golden age of repertory cinema.
As for new releases, I've heard only good things about the new horror flick Obsession and some surprisingly positive stuff about the crypto-heist movie LifeHack. I've heard mostly terrible things about The Wizard of the Kremlin (and I have unspeakably Tarantinoesque feelings about Paul Dano) but I love director Olivier Assayas and I'm intrigued by the idea of Jude Law as Putin.
Below, I recommend Secret Friend, out this week, and I've also (finally) gotten around to writing reviews of Blue Heron, Hokum, and The Christophers (which closes today, but hey, there's always streaming.)
Special Screenings
Thursday, May 14
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
AMC Southdale 16
Where the Michelle Yeohaissance began. $7. 4 p.m. More info here.
Waiting for Guffman (1996)
Emagine Willow Creek
The first (and best?) of Christopher Guest's string of great improvved ensemble mockumentaries. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Vertigo (1958)
Grandview 1&2
Well, somebody is really into blondes. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Heights Theater
Get this? "Baby" is a leopard! $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, May 15
Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986)
Heights Theater
With Troma Films founder Lloyd Kaufman in attendance. $19. 7 p.m. More info here.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
Orchestra Hall
I think this is the one with the Chamber of Secrets. Also Thursday. $50-$130. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Trylon
Kenji Mizoguchi’s bleak, moving masterpiece. Don’t miss it. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 9:30 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, May 16
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Alamo Drafthouse
What does the new gen of romance fans make of the smash bestseller this movie is based on? $10.99. 3:15 p.m. More info here.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2001)
Heights Theater
A movie based on a theme-park ride! What will they think of next? $11. 11 a.m. More info here.
#Shakespeare's Shitstorm (2020)
Heights Theater
The latest from Troma, with Lloyd Kaufman again in attendance. $19. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, May 17
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Alamo Drafthouse
Boots Riley’s anti-capitalist romp. $10.99. 3:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuner (2026)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
Advance screening of a thriller in which a piano tuner gets involved with safecrackers. $18.99. 4 p.m. More info here.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Grandview 1&2
The movie that invented knuckle tattoos. Also Thursday. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
An Affair to Remember (1957)
Heights Theater
They shoulda had cell phones. $13. 11:30 a.m. More info here.
Begin Again (2013)
Lagoon Cinema
Mark Ruffalo is a fading record exec who discovers Keira Knightley. $11. 2 p.m. Wednesday 4:25 & 7 p.m. More info here.
Mommie Dearest (1981)
Roxxy’s Cabaret
I think of this movie every time I use wire hangers. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Man Between (1953)
Trylon
James Mason is a smuggler hoping to defect to West Berlin in Carol Reed’s postwar thriller. $8. 8 p.m. 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, May 18
Attack on Titan: The Last Attack (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
The final episodes of season 4, recut for the theater. Through Wednesday. $13.99. Showtimes and more info here.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
Edina Mann
Mickey Rooney… noooooo!!! Also Wednesday. $12.12. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Child (1977)
Emagine Willow Creek
I think it’s creepy kid month at Emagine. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
WTF: Watch Terrible Films Club
56 Brewing
I don’t know what the movie’s gonna be, but I know it’s gonna be terrible. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
Heights Theater
That’s too many beavers! $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
Marcus Mystery Movie
Marcus West End
Another secret movie. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
No One Cares About Crazy People (2025)
Parkway Theater
A look at the lives of people with severe mental illness. $12/$17. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, May 19
The Slumber Party Massacre (1992)
Alamo Drafthouse
The slasher-subverting classic. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
That They May Be One (2026)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
The latest Jesus-based doc. Also Wednesday. Showtimes, prices, and more info here.
The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A tiny teen makes a big friend. Also Wednesday. $16.19. 1 & 4 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, May 20
All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere (2026)
Alamo Drafthouse
The making of Blood Incarnation’s latest, with a livestream Q&A. $13.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
By Design (2026)
Alamo Drafthouse
Juliette Lewis swaps places with a chair. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Space Jam (1996)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
It’s no Roger Rabbit. $18.99. Showtimes and more info here.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Parkway Theater
Bond enters the blockbuster era. $9/$12. Music from Black Widows at 7 p.m. More info here.
The Warped Forest (2011)
Trylon
A very strange Japanese movie I’m not even gonna try to synopsize. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Walker Art Center
“The first American feature directed by an African American woman to receive a theatrical release”—check that date again. But on top of that a sui generis bit of poetic cinema. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, May 21
Edina Community Shorts
Edina Mann
A very local film fest. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Best in Show (2000)
Emagine WIllow Creek
Yep, dog people are weird. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Heights Theater
Look, I know “Cary Grant is an airborne mail carrier” doesn’t sound like much, but trust me on this one. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
The First Rainbow Coalition (2019)
East Side Freedom Library
How the Black Panthers united the working class of all races in Chicago. Presented by TriLingua Cinema. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Compensation (1999)
Walker Art Center
Parallel stories of a deaf woman and a hearing man falling in love at different moments in history. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
I always wanna be a wuxia snob about it but sorry this movie is great.
In the Grey
The latest from Guy Ritchie.
Is God Is
Aleshea Harris's story of two sisters seeking revenge.
LifeHack
British teens scam a tech billionaire.
Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe
Yeah, I’m not even gonna pretend here.
Obsession
Feel like “make a magical wish” is up there with “go down in the basement alone” on the list of things you should just not do.
Shrek
Back in theaters for its 25th anniversary.
Silent Friend
Look folks, this is a two-and-a-half-hour movie about a solitary ginkgo tree and its effects on three different people at three different moments in time. (Whispering to my date: That’s the Silent Friend.) I will refrain from calling the movie “meditative” because too many reviewers already have, and the adrenaline junkies among you know what that critic’s euphemism really means. But I’m the guy writing the review here, and I was engrossed in Hungarian writer/director Ildikó Enyedi’s essay of sorts on the interrelationship between humans and their natural environment, a milder exploration of some of the same themes as Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory. Tony Leung Chiu-wai (in a role written explicitly for him) is a Hong Kong professor marooned at a solitary German university during Covid. Luna Wedler becomes that university’s first female student at the turn of the 20th century, and she explores her sexuality by studying photography. Enzo Brumm is a first-gen university student, just off the farm, studying poetry and out of step with the free-living ’70s, who falls for a botanist and winds up caring for her geranium while she’s off hiking with her latest lover. Each is an outsider in some way, each suffers from loneliness and detachment while exploring new ways of connection, each illustrates the blurred lines behind human technology and natural systems of. And Leung’s presence, already indelible in Wong Kar-Wai’s films decades ago, has only deepened with age. A-
Top Gun
Celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Top Gun: Maverick
Not celebrating any notable anniversary. Full review here.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
A tornado brings a Kansas girl to Moscow.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour 3D
Blue Heron
What if your child is just somehow… broken? That’s the question that haunts both Blue Heron, the debut feature from Sophy Romvari, and the filmmaker herself. The offspring in question is an older brother whose death Romvari already grieved in her short film Still Processing (something of a sensation in that limited way that arty short films can be sensations) and who is called Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) in this light fictionalization of her childhood in British Columbia. The movie is largely told from the perspective of eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), Sophy’s stand-in. Shortly after relocating from Hungary, her parents notice their eldest son acting out in ways that are alternately banal and dangerous. Later in the film, Sasha revisits the past as an adult, believing that by understanding it she can somehow alter it, and her efforts only accentuate her family’s helplessness in the face of Jeremy’s behavior. Blue Heron is a film about memory—less concerned with its accuracy than with how it shapes us, as well as how it’s shaped itself but home movies and photos and other artifacts. Like Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun it gropes toward a past it can’t quite recapture, though Jeremy is far more enigmatic than the father in that film. “Art is not therapy” is generally a solid rule of thumb, but exceptions can be made for artists who understand that therapy is about asking questions, not answering them. When the film ends, you get the sense that Romvari is, yes, still processing. A
The Christophers—ends May 14
In the latest from Steven Soderbergh, Jessica Gunning and James Corden are the bumbling children of a reclusive, once-celebrated London painter (Ian McKellan); they enlist a touch-up artist (Michaela Coel) to quietly finish a legendary series of works that the old man abandoned so they can cash in when he dies. McKellan is perfectly garrulous as Julian Sklar, a cynical retiree who records Cameos all day and who once regularly eviscerated fledgling artists on a TV show called Art Fight, while Coel is the laconic foil who draws him out in unexpected ways. And Ed Solomon’s script genuinely wants to discuss art—the impulses behind it, the reception of it, questions of authorship—in more complex ways than the usual ”creative process” mystification clichés. But the warmth the film reaches for in the soppier third act feels a bit beyond Soderbergh these days, despite the actors’ best efforts. That’s the thing with the director’s later films—regardless of how well-crafted and effective they are, they can feel like arbitrary exercises. You sometimes get the sense that Soderbergh would have just as happy if he made a different film than the one you’re watching. That distance adds an unnecessary chill to The Christophers, but for as long as it’s two great actors squaring off against one another the movie is entertaining as hell. B+
Deep Water—ends May 14
Hokum
More like ho-hum. Writer/director Damian McCarthy’s first feature, Oddity, was constrained but effective, reaching its conclusion with the fatalist logic of a folktale. But though this attempt at an atmospheric chiller is focused on one locale, it sprawls too far both narratively and thematically. Adam Scott is Ohm Bauman, a blocked novelist with a bad attitude who travels to Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes at the site of their honeymoon, finish his damn book, and, yes, grapple with C H I L D H O O D T R A U M A. And wouldn’t you just know it, he stays in one of those old hotels with a room no one must enter because it’s haunted by a witch. There’s no shortage of events in Hokum: provincial oddballs drift in and out of the story with various motives and preoccupations, Bauman flashes back to harsh images from childhood, there’s even a suicide attempt. Yet through it all, Scott doesn’t just seem annoyed with the other characters—he seems irritated to be in this movie in the first place, and there’s something all too contagious about his peevishness. If he’s wondering when we can just get this nonsense over with and move on, why shouldn’t you and I as well? C
Hoppers—ends May 14
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
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
The Stranger
"Great butts" may not be a comment you’d expect to hear about a Camus adaptation, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve made it about a François Ozon film. The libertine French director’s Meursault is Benjamin Voisin, who made his mark in Ozon’s Summer of 85 and then held his own at the center of the 2021 Balzac adaptation Lost Illusions. Voisin has the look of a lippy sensualist, whether he’s enduring his mother’s funeral, distractedly fucking the woman who inexplicably adores him, or sealing his fate by shooting an Arab. In other words, he seems impeccably French in attitude and style, as does the film itself, shot as it is in a stylized black and white by cinematographer Manu DacosseI—Dennis Levant even shows up to do his weird-little-guy act. And if the film’s requisite 21st century postcolonial framing can feel a little studied, so can the novel’s postwar absurdism, non? (Another sign of the times: When I typed “Is Meursault” and Google completed “autistic” before I got it—apparently there’s a whole literature on the question.) A-
