Today is supposed to be better than yesterday, weather-wise, but as I write this it’s still yesterday and it is deathly hot out there. The air conditioned megaplex will be awfully tempting this weekend, unless you’ve decided to board yourself in the basement for the duration. (In which case, I don’t blame you at all.)
Still, here’s what’s playing:
Always At the Carlyle: Matthew Miele follows Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s and Crazy About Tiffany’s with another document of New York white privilege, this time focusing on the vaunted Upper East Side hotel. I guess it’s a career.
Ant-Man and The Wasp: With a little more time to prepare, Peyton Reed, Paul Rudd et al reunite for a sequel that delivers on all the promise of the original. And Hannah John-Kamen was right; after Infinity War, it’s exactly what we need.
Boundaries: Shana Feste’s carefully calibrated indie would be a hell of a lot better if it wasn’t so carefully calibrated … but this isn’t a movie about artistic risks, it’s a movie about Christopher Plummer twinkling while Vera Farmiga fumes. Like everything else this week except possibly Ant-Man and The Wasp, it could have used more Bobby Cannavale.
Fireworks: The fates of three young people are stitched together, pulled apart and stitched together again in this animated adaptation of a 1993 TV drama written by Shunji Iwai. Which sounds neat.
Leave No Trace: Eight years after Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik makes a most welcome return to dramatic features with a similarly concentrated but radically different study of family loyalty. Ben Foster and Thomasin
The Oslo Diaries: At Hot Docs earlier this year, Susan was a big supporter of Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan’s look at what was almost certainly the only real chance for lasting peace between the Palestinian and Israeli nations — and how it was all thrown aside for a perpetual conflict.
22 Chaser: Rafal Sokolowski’s first feature — about a tow-truck driver making a series of increasingly bad decisions to keep his family afloat — has a strong cast and makes Toronto look more like itself than usual. It’s just a little on the slack side.
Oh, and The First Purge opened on Wednesday, and Rad’s review just went up. He’s conflicted. I would be too. Go see the Marvel movie, it’s fun.