Gotta admit, Christopher Nolan has sucked up most of the oxygen in the movie world this week. The only other openings are a Christian comedy, an Indian film, and an indie pic that was supposed to open last week. I've had my say about The Odyssey here.
But in the repertory world there's still plenty happening. The Parkway continues its Brooklyn series with Do the Right Thing and Saturday Night Fever. The Trylon's serving up two incredible Claudette Colbert comedies this weekend. Emagine's got some gritty '80s teen flicks. The Walker's series of late 20th century blockbusters about manhood proceeds. So get outta the smoke and get in a theater.
Special Screenings
Thursday, July 16
Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street (1996)
East Side Freedom Library
Documentary about urban redevelopment and community in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Out of the Blue (2008)
Emagine Willow Creek
Starring the great Linda Manz. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Granada
A movie based on an amusement park ride? Now I’ve seen everything! Presented by Taste the Movies. Sold out. 6 p.m. More info here.
Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Grandview 1&2
Winona and Angelina in a mental institution. $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants (2025)
Marcus West End
Hope they find him. $3. 11:30 a.m. More info here.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Parkway Theater
Love that we’re getting so many opportunities to see this in theaters this summer. $9/$12. Performance by Carnage the Executioner at 7 p.m. Film at 8 p.m. More info here.
The Wild Robot (2024)
Riverview Theater
Note to Brunch Buds readers: This is Redacto’s favorite movie. $2. 10:30 a.m. More info here.
Fargo (1996)
Riverview Theater
Yes, some of you really do talk like this. $7. 10:15 p.m. More info here.
Slap the Monster on Page One (1973)
Trylon
A right-wing newspaper owner sets out to pin a murder on a leftist politician. Presented by Archives on Screen Twin Cities. $8. 7 p.m. More info here.
Hoppers (2026)
Victory Park
A girl becomes a robot beaver. Free. 8:55 p.m. More info here.
Die Hard (1988)
Walker Art Center
It’s Christmas in July! $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, July 17
Flow (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
I love that this cat is as dumb as an actual cat. $7. 12:30 p.m. Monday-Wednesday 4 p.m. More info here.
The Bad Guys 2 (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
Sam Rockwell is a wolf, fwiw. $8. Friday, Monday-Thursday 11 a.m. Saturday-Sunday noon. More info here.
Coco (2017)
Midway Peace Park
Yes, this made me cry. Free. Dusk. More info here.
Tinsman Road (2025)/The Outwaters (2022)
TriLingua Cinema
Two found-footage horror flicks presented by their creator, Robbie Banfitch. Free. 6 & 9 p.m. More info here.
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Trylon
Claudette Colbert dumps Joel McCrea in search of a new husband. But in a really funny way! $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 5 & 9 p.m. Sunday 1 p.m. More info here.
Midnight (1939)
Trylon
A very screwy screwball. $8. 9 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Walker Art Center
Is this still IMDB’s favorite movie of all time? $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, July 19
The Never Ending Story (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
It’s still going. Also Wednesday. $11. 3:30 & 6:20 p.m. More info here.
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Grandview 1&2
Richard Butler! Fantastico! Also Thursday. $14.14. $9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Pout-Pout Fish (2026)
Marcus West End
Why so serious? $3. Sunday & Tuesday 10:45 a.m. Monday & Wednesday 11:35 a.m. Thursday 11:30 a.m. More info here.
Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
Roxy’s Cabaret
Crazy that they are actually finally making a sequel. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Trylon
Hot! But politically trenchant! But hot! $8. 5 & 7 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, July 20
The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
Alamo Drafthouse
What if the hideous Phantom was actually kinda hot? Thank you, Lord Lloyd Webber. $20. 6:45 p.m. More info here.
Tiny Furniture (2010)
Alamo Drafthouse
How small is it? $10.99. 1 p.m. More info here.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)
AMC Southdale 16
Gotta do something with the kids, right? Also Wednesday. $3. 11 & 2 p.m. More info here.
Mob Psycho 100 (2016)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
An eighth grader struggles to control his psychic powers. $13.99. 7 p.m. More info here.
Amelie (2001)
Edina Mann
A terrifying young woman controls the lives of unwitting Parisians. Also Wednesday. $12.12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Trolls (2016)
Edina Mann
How it all started. Also Wednesday. $4.53. 10 a.m. More info here.
Error_MovieTitle_Unknown
Emagine WIllow Creek
A secret new movie. $7. 7 p.m. More info here.
Psychomania (1973)
Emagine Willow Creek
A biker makes a deal with the devil. Those never end well! $9. 7 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.
Finding Dory (2016)
Jim Lupient Water Park
A forgetful fish gets lost! Free. 8:55 p.m. More info here.
The Ring (2002)
Main Cinema
RIP Daveigh Chase. Presented by Sloppy Discs. $15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Marcus Mystery Movie
Marcus West End
What could it be? $6. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, July 21
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Alamo Drafthouse
Gotta love a movie about a creepy surgeon. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Evangelion Death (True) 2 & Rebirth (1998)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
I can never figure out which version of an anime is supposed to be the “good” one or the “real” one or whatever. So confusing! AMC: $15. 7 p.m. More info here. Marcus: $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Roman Holiday (1953)
Parkway Theater
Audrey Hepburn gets her hair cut. $15. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Bad Guys 2 (2025)
Riverview Theater
Lotta chances to see this. Through Thursday. $2. 10:30 a.m. More info here.
GOAT (2026)
Waite Park
A goat dreams of being a “roarball” star. Free. 8:55 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, July 22
The Substance (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
A pure gorefest disguised as arthouse body horror—pretty sneaky. Full review here. $20. 6:45 p.m. More info here.
Orlando (1992)
Alamo Drafthouse
Tilda Swinton plays all the genders. $10.99. 1 p.m. More info here.
The End of Evangelion (1997)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
The movie-length alternate (and I believe preferred?) ending to the TV series. Rosedale: $15. 7 & 7:45 p.m. More info here. Southdale: $15. 7 & 7:15 p.m. More info here. Marcus: $13. 7:25 p.m. More info here.
The Merry Widow
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Lagoon Cinema/Marcus West End
A Met summer encore. 1 & 6:30 p.m. Prices and more info here.
Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025)
The Commons
The one with the submerged arctic submarine. Free. 8:50 p.m. More info here.
The Dark Knight (2008)
Lagoon Cinema
This is the one with the Joker. $11. 4:15 & 7 p.m. More info here.
Phantom Beirut (1998)
Trylon
A man resurfaces after faking his death 10 years earlier. Presented by Mizna. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, July 23
Sia: Nostalgic for the Present (2026)
AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
You guys remember Sia. $17. 7 p.m. More info here.
River’s Edge (1986)
Emagine Willow Creek
‘80s teen burnout month continues at Emagine. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Carnival: They Can’t Steal Our Joy (2025)
Main Cinema
A documentary about Caribbean Carnival. $15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Parkway Theater
Revisit a time when Brooklyn was uncool. $9/$12. DJ Shane Kramer at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)
Phillips Park
It’s-a me, Mario Galaxy. Free. 8:50 p.m. More info here.
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Riverview Theater
A Minnesota classic. $7. 10:05 p.m. More info here.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Rivoli Bluff Farm
I love the noises they make when they eat. Presented by TriLingua Cinema. Free. 9 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bad Counselors
Ah, a “faith-based” comedy.
The Odyssey—read full review here
What we tend to forget about The Odyssey is that it’s maybe 10% cool mythological shit like one-eyed giant cannibals and sinister witches and gods punishing impudent mortals and like 90% about exchanging gifts with your hosts and telling very long stories to impress them. What’s remarkable about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (I’ll get to its vexing flaws soon enough) is that it honors this aspect of the epic while delivering the supernatural adventure film moviegoers want. B+
Oh Sukumari
An Indian romantic comedy.
Rose of Nevada
Of all the young guys in movies these days who look like Callum Turner and George McKay, Callum Turner and George McKay are two of the better ones. Director Mark Jenkin had a promising if narrative-averse breakthrough in 2022 with the folk horror tone poem Enys Men. And the setup here—two young men sail on a cursed Cornish fishing boat that transports them back in time—isn’t just intriguing, but makes for a solid metaphor of how dying towns survive on the backs of the youth who remain behind. But excuse me if Rose of Nevada is a little too vibes-first for Mr. What Happens Next? here. Once the two men develop opposing reactions to their fate—Turner’s Liam sees this as an opportunity to become the family man he never was, while McKay misses his present-day family and is desperate to return—we’ve learned about all we’re going to from these characters. All that remains to be experienced is atmospherics, film presence, spooky tension, and storms at sea. Which ain’t nothing. B
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
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 eeriness. Backrooms is an A minus haunted house padded out into a B minus movie, so let’s just say… B
Dhamaal 4—ends July 16
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—ends July 16
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-
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
A David Wain movie is an extremely known quantity. How funny you’ll find it, the ways in which you’ll find it funny, which actors will pop by, credited and un- —these factors are preordained. In the scattershot Zucker Brothers tradition (though the sensibility is crass in a hip way rather than a crude way), basically every line is a joke, or arrives in the form of a joke, and maybe a third of ’em land, though all the jokes have to be told regardless because my third may not be yours. As far as plot goes: When her boyfriend unexpectedly hooks up with his “celebrity sex pass,” Jennifer Aniston, the titular Gail (Zoey Deutch) takes off for L.A. with her gay friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), where to settle the score she decides she has to bang John Hamm. Along the way they’re befriended by a would-be agent (Ben Wong), a paparazzo (Ken Marino), and John Slattery (John Slattery) and you start to realize (Daughtry Gail? Otto? Hey, wait a minute…) this is also a Wizard of Oz parody. There are also goons out to recapture Important Documents for a wicked witch (Sabrina Impacciatore). It’s all an amusing mess, and everyone is game, especially Deutch, adorably wide-eyed but never naive or virginal. B
The Invite
We all know couples like Angela and Joe. As played by Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogan, they’re perpetually bickering over things you can’t believe either cares all that much about, as though following a preordained script. We’re less likely to know a couple like Hawk and Pina, embodied by two of our most ageless actors, Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz. The older couple has frequent, explosive sex upstairs, which irritates Joe, intrigues Angela, and becomes a topic of intense discussion when Hawk and Pina come downstairs one night for dinner. Over the course of one exhausting, hilarious, and loquacious evening, Joe and Angela are forced to confront some truths about their relationship. Joe falls back on wisecracks, Angela turns positively giddy at the thought of experiencing orgasms like Pina’s, and composer Devonte Hynes’s strings ratchet up the tension throughout. I can’t say I wholly agree with the film’s final assessment of their relationship—for all its pyrotechnics, the Will McCormack/Rashida Jones script doesn’t give us much beyond the surface, even when it purports to peek underneath. But what a surface it is. Norton is on a nice later career run and Cruz is just a fuckin’ movie star whatever she does. And as for Wilde the director, she makes a few awkward shot choices but the screwball-paced dialogue guides us through a (mostly) single-set film that’s rarely stagey and only as claustrophobic as it’s meant to be. I’m ready to pretend Don’t Worry Darling never happened if she is. A-
Maddie's Secret
The best thing about John Early’s directorial debut is his own performance as Maddie Ralph, a sweetly obliging woman whose bulimia resurfaces when her online cooking videos unexpectedly go viral. That star turn—stylized yet credible—allows Early to execute a precisely calibrated balance of melodramatics and laughs. It’s a pointed contrast to the supporting characters: Maddie’s Secret serves us the sort of supporting actors you might expect from a hip comedy (Kate Berlant as a horny, obsessive lesbian, Conner O’ Malley as a sleazy food show producer, and so forth) while Kristen Johnson flaunts a virtuosic lack of subtlety as Maddie’s horrific mom. Maddie’s Secret occasionally feels like a tonal exercise, a challenge to see how thoroughly Early can sentimentalize bad taste without toppling into camp or kitsch, though that's no small feat. People with actual eating disorders should proceed with caution, of course, though I’m plenty curious what they make of all this. B+
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
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+
