If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.
Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.
Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!
As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.
Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.
