Furiosa has scared most everyone else away from opening this weekend, but there's plenty in theaters to catch up on, including two movies I reviewed this week: I Saw the TV Glow and Evil Does Not Exist. Also you can watch the Wolves games at The Riverview for free—I haven't taken any measurements, though I'm guessing that's a bigger screen than any bar has available.
Special Screenings
Thursday, May 23
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
Grandview 1&2
Hm, I was aware of no such perks as a teen. $12. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 11:59 p.m. More info here.
The Matrix (1999)
The Heights
Never heard of it. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Army of Darkness (1992)
The Parkway
What happens when a guy with a chainsaw for a hand is catapulted back to the Middle Ages? $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Road Wars: Max Fury (2024)
Trylon
Title really reminds me of a new summer blockbuster. Pure coincidence, I'm sure. $8. 5 p.m. More info here.
Friday, May 24
Radical (2024)
The Parkway
Director Toussaint Morrison's latest project is set in Minneapolis is the days following the murder of George Floyd. $20. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Great place to watch Game 2, huh? Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Santo Contra Hombres Infernales (1961)
Trylon
The great luchador battles drug smugglers in Cuba. $8. Friday 7 p.m. Saturday 8:45 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Batwoman (1968)
Trylon
A luchador superheroine must prevent a mad scientist from creating a race of Gill Men! $8 Friday 8:45 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 4:45 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, May 25
Back to the Future (1985)
Alamo Drafthouse
A white kid travels back in time to invent rock 'n' roll. Reagan's America, I tell ya! $10.74. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Star Wars—Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi (1983)
The Parkway
Whoa, I though they were kidding about that whole "Darth Vader is Luke's father" thing! $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
The Parkway
Will you people keep it down? I’m trying to watch the movie! With live shadow cast performance by Transvestite Soup. $10/$15. Midnight. More info here.
Sunday, May 26
Charade (1963)
Alamo Drafthouse
Like a Hitchcock movie, but with a brunette star. $10.74. 11 a.m. More info here.
Back to the Future (1985)
Emagine Willow Creek
In case you missed it yesterday. Also Monday & Wednesday. $9. 12:30 p.m. & 6:30 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Yep, they're showing the whole series. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Verdict (1982)
Trylon
Paul Newman is an alcoholic lawyer trying to redeem himself. $8. 6:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:30 p.m. More info here.
Monday, May 27
Roadhouse (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
The original is still the greatest. $10.74. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
The Prowler (1981)
Emagine Willow Creek
Is a WWII vet killing college kids? $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Rear Window (1954)
The Heights
I can’t sum it up any better than this tweet does. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, May 28
In a Violent Nature (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening of the new slasher flick. $7.52 7:25 p.m. More info here.
NBA Playoffs: Timberwolves vs. Dallas Mavericks
Riverview Theater
Naz Reid. Free. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, May 29
Bride of Re-Animator (1989)
Alamo Drafthouse
The inevitable sequel. $10.74. 6:15 p.m. More info here.
The Commandant's Shadow (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Showplace ICON
Rudolf Höss's son meets a Holocaust survivor. $16.26. 4 & 7 p.m. More info here.
Infiltrators (2012)
Bryant Lake Bowl
A documentary about the difficult everyday lives of Palestinians. $5-$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)
Emagine Willow Creek
Starring Lee Horsley. He played Matt Houston! Remember him? Oh god, I'm so old. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Babes
Ilana Glazer is single and pregnant in Pamela Adlon's directorial debut.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
My deep moral objection to prequels will not prevent me from watching George Miller smash up a bunch of cool vehicles in the desert.
Sight
The story of a Chinese immigrant who becomes a world-renowned eye surgeon.
The Garfield Movie
Ugh, now even frickin' Garfield has trauma?
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Back to Black
Not the exploitative disaster some are calling it, or at least no more exploitative a disaster than most music biopics. Yet even if the genuinely insightful documentary Amy from 2015 didn’t exist to make any dramatization of Amy Winehouse’s life feel redundant, extracting a recognizably human story from an almost too perfect cautionary tale of fame without surrendering to cliché would require a real gift. It’s certainly beyond the director Sam Taylor-Johnson (whose takes on sex and drugs you can sample in her adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey and A Million Little Pieces) or specialist in biopic screenplays Matthew Greenhalgh. (The movie literally shows us a caged bird singing, and more than once.) Marisa Abela is a lively screen presence who deserves to do more than impersonate a dead icon and mouth platitudes. As Winehouse’s on-and-off husband and lover Blake Fielder-Civil, Jack O'Connell offers an adult rehash of his Skins character, Eddie Marsen looks dazed throughout as Winehouse’s dad, and every time I see Lesley Manville (Amy’s beloved Nan here) I’m reminded what a crime it is that Mike Leigh can’t get financing for his films. Carefully sidestepping the issue of how complicit Fielder-Civil and those around Winehouse were in enabling her addiction, the film ends with Amy, sober and alone and a multiple Grammy winner, as though this momentary resolution somehow allows us to ignore what happened next. C+
Challengers (read the full review here)
Mildly pervy Euro auteur Luca Guadagnino has concocted a sort of Jules et Jim for les enfants de TikTok et PRIME sports drinks, with Zendaya as the apex of a love triangle who reveals that the other two points—scurfy Josh O’Connor and submissive Mike Faist—also have the hots for each other. What Guadagnino gets about Zendaya is that she excels as an observer, a judgmental force that doubles as a relatable audience surrogate. If there’s something of the fashion model’s posture to her confidence, and a flatness to her characterization—she’s all impulse and response—Challengers allows us to postpone any hard questions about development as an actor because its pleasures are all so wonderfully superficial. You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it. Why in my day, we had to go to grad school, study Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and learn to read homosocial desire into seemingly “straight” fictions. What once was subtext is now reflected vividly in Zendaya’s shades. B+
Civil War
Alex Garland’s alt-history war flick is a very easy movie to pretend to think about, and the crosscurrent of opinions has proven once again that people are very bad at watching movies—are maybe not even sure why they watch movies to begin with. I’m sure you know the set up: The U.S. has splintered into four warring factions, and we’re not told why. (The absolute lack of world-building is an overdue slap in the face to loremongers and Vox explainer culture.) Kirsten Dunst is Lee Smith, a legendary photojournalist undergoing a crisis of conscience; Cailee Spaeny (so fresh-faced she looks like she cut chem lab to be there) is the young wannabe who latches onto her. Together they trek to D.C., hoping to arrive before it falls to insurgents, and they experience a string of Apocalypse Now-style episodic grotesqueries along the way. Like most modern war movies, Civil War thinks it’ll disabuse us of our romantic notions of battle; like most successful war movies, it works as entertainment rather than ethical treatise. We don’t want rocket launchers actually fired into the Lincoln Memorial any more than we actually want Tokyo to be flattened by giant lizards or teenage girls to be butchered by psychopaths. We want images of our anxieties and desires displayed in a context where we’re free of the moral obligation to decide which are the anxieties and which are the desires, because what’s happening is “just a movie.” Civil War is a film rightly distrustful of the power of images that nonetheless relies on the considerable power of its own images to work. Fortunately, nobody has ever said horror movies had to be ideologically coherent. A-
Dune: Part 2 (read the full review here)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was a well-crafted slog, occasionally spectacular but often merely studently, as the director seemed intent to prove that he deserved the assignment. But with all the power players set in place, Part Two does an awful lot right. Villeneuve distills the essence of the novel’s currents of deception and misdirection into a legible screenplay while generating some truly uncanny moments. And as Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet shows us a man who makes a pragmatic decision to exploit the dogmatism of his followers because he believes that every other choice will cause more death and destruction, or who at least rationalizes his motives that way. With IP-recycling now the culture industry’s standard cannibalistic practice, Villeneuve, like Paul, imagines himself the good guy in this scenario, respectful of the traditions placed in his care rather than merely exploitative. But also like Paul there are forces at play beyond his control. So what happens when Villeneuve’s hero threatens to become a butcher? Stay tuned (Duned?) for Part 3. B+
Evil Does Not Exist (read the full review here)
If you asked me what Ryusuke Hamaguchi's follow up to Drive My Car is about, I’d say that a Tokyo company plans to open a glamping resort in the village of Mizubiki, and the villagers, quite reasonably, would prefer that their environmentally unspoiled location not become “a tourist hot spot.” The dramatic highlight of the film is an uncomfortable information session company reps present to the townspeople, a public fantasy of how every true democrat imagines a community meeting functioning, and also a kind of private wish fulfillment for anyone who’s ever stammered when finally given the opportunity to speak their mind to the powerful. But It might be more accurate to skip past the central conflict entirely and call Evil Does Not Exist a movie about a man quietly performing simple tasks with precision and duty. As Takum, Hitoshi Omika is hypnotically opaque, hiding his thoughts from us while his actions, when not routine, are unexplained. Or maybe it's about the relationship between cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa's shots of the forest outside Mizubiki and Eiko Ishibashi’s score, which seems to notice how we’ve responded to the images on screen and whisper “Are you sure?” Or it may just be about the feeling you have upon leaving the film: like waking up slowly, failing to recall exactly where your subconscious took you last night, and finding yourself unable to shake the feeling that something awful really has happened. A-
The Fall Guy
David Leitch’s latest collection of bad quips and big booms isn’t quite the headache that Bullet Train was. But it is the kind of movie where we’re told that a dog will bite a guy in the nuts on command, and then two minutes later the dog bites a guy in the nuts on command, and then the audience claps with glee. And it’s also one of those behind-the-scenes “love letters to the movies” that makes you wish everyone involved loved movies just a little less. There are some fine over-the-top stunts and action sequences, but Leitch often undercuts them with rampant too-muchness—why set Ryan Gosling’s fight with goons on a flatbed truck to Emily Blunt singing “Against All Odds” at karaoke, and then cut back and forth between the two? Gosling and Blunt do have some chemistry, as two attractive people with acting skills will, but He’s Just Ken was clearly over-rewarded with praise last year. If he coasts on his tics (that smirk ‘n’ gaze, those quick, clipped replies) for the rest of his career, Barbie will have a lot to answer for. C+
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
I Saw the TV Glow (read the full review here)
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun once again reconfigures the trans coming-out narrative as a horror story, as open to peril as to promise. Two teens growing up in the ’90s bond over a Buffy-style show; as the edges of supposed fiction and supposed reality blur, the knowledge they gain about their potential selves brings suffering, whether they accept or retreat from that insight. A jarring remix of ’90s kid culture, recollected in something less than tranquility, I Saw the TV Glow reinstates the TV as the box of ominous mystery it once was, solid enough not just to represent other worlds, but to contain them. The weird is familiarized, the familiar is enweirdened. And in Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith, Schoenbrun has two leads who know how to communicate within Lynchian blend of heightened mood and flattened affect. A-
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Thanks in part to Andy Serkis’s unparalleled gift for portraying a motion-captured being with nuance and sympathy, screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver somehow created a non-laughably epic saga out of an intelligent simian’s rise to power with their rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy. At least that’s how I remember it—this fourth installment (with frequent Jaffa/Silver collaborator Josh Friedman taking over the script) is so ape-by-numbers I’m kinda afraid to rewatch its predecessors. The plot concerns a struggle over the legacy of Serkis’s honorable Caesar (along with some nasty human weaponry), and as ever, the chimps are curious, the gorillas brutal, the orangutans wise, the humans deceptive. Despite a few fine action scenes, Kingdom is as humorless as the trilogy but without its grand sweep, as misanthropic but without its capacity to imagine looming disaster. I’ve always been leery of how these films toy with the eco-nihilist claim that Earth is better off without humans, but this sort of IP busywork does make me think twice. Will ape and human someday learn to live together in peace? Who gives a fuck? C+
