Kate and I are moving next week, so updates may get spotty over the next few days. But don’t worry, there’s plenty for you to watch if I go dark. Just look at what’s arriving this weekend, for example!
Free State of Jones: The road to Hell is paved with movies like Gary Ross’ prestige misfire — a film that insists so hard on its own realism that you can almost feel the makeup and wardrobe teams just out of frame, itching to touch up Matthew McConaughey’s authentically distressed shirt collar before the next take. (Also, the script is terrible.)
Hunt for the Wilderpeople: Sam Neill and Julian Dennison are mismatched bush adventurers in Taika Waititi’s Kiwi coming-of-age dramedy, a nice companion piece to the goofy melancholy of Boy.
Independence Day: Resurgence: Twenty years later, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin follow up their summer smash with a craven attempt to turn a one-off into a franchise. Honestly, you’ll feel sorry for being so mean to Jurassic World. (My review will be up later this afternoon.)
Look Again: Magic glasses allow a lonely man to judge the souls of anyone he meets in Daniel O’Connor’s oddball comedy, opening out at the Kingsway. Rad enjoyed it.
The Neon Demon: Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest is old wine in a preposterously ornate bottle, riffing on De Palma, Mann and Argento/Bava with a slice of Schrader’s Cat People thrown in for good measure. And if it was any good, that’d be cool. But it isn’t.
The Shallows: Blake Lively runs afoul of a hungry shark while surfing in Mexico in the latest exercise in restricted narratives from Non-Stop director Jaume Collet-Serra. Honestly, you don’t want to know any more than that.
Three: Johnnie To’s also working with a restricted narrative, limiting the action of his latest Hong Kong thriller to a hospital where a surgeon, a cop and a gangster find themselves at cross purposes.
Tickled: David Farrier and Dylan Reeve go down a rabbit hole of psychosexual weirdness when they investigate the apparently totally legitimate sport of Competitive Endurance Tickling. Try to see it cold.
And there you go! And now to go pack the LaserDiscs. Pray for Mojo.