It’s a busy start to a new month in Memphis movie theaters. The biggest money film opening this Friday is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the $110 million sequel to the 2018 Spider-Man spinoff. It stars Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson as hosts of feuding alien symbiots dead set on, you guessed it, carnage. It’s directed by legendary actor Andy Serkis, who as Gollum, Snoke, and Caesar, is the greatest motion capture artist of all time.
Speaking of becoming a monster, The Sopranos has been having a bit of a comeback lately. Did HBO’s suburban gangster show ever really go away at all? Now comes The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by series creator David Chase. Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, plays his father’s most famous character, Tony Soprano, as he learns the life lessons that will make a mobster.
Opening exclusively at Studio on the Square is a film that has already made a bit of history. Earlier this year, director Julia Ducournau became only the second woman in history to win the Palme d’Or, the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival—and the first woman to win it outright. (Jane Campion’s The Piano tied with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine in 1993.) I loved Ducournau’s 2016 psychological cannibal horror Raw, and by all accounts, Titane is indescribably bonkers. So, I’m there.
It’s October 1, and that means it’s time to hang the cobwebs, put out the pumpkins, and watch horror movies. The Addams Family 2 is not exactly horror, but it’s certainly Halloween-y. The second CGI incarnation of the beloved vamp fam from TV history features an all-star voice cast that will probably be your only opportunity to see Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Snoop Dogg and Bette Midler in the same credits.
While the chilling and macabre were present in cinema from the beginning, and films such as Häxan and The Phantom Carriage were hits in the 1920s, the era of the horror film began in 1931 with a pair of films that will screen as a double feature on Saturday at the Malco Paradiso and the Collierville Cinema Grill. The first was Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s vampire count. The film, which turned Universal Pictures into a horror machine, is full of iconic scenes like this one.
A few months later, director James Whale one-upped the children of the night by adapting Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. To my eyes, Dracula is creaky and Victorian, while Frankenstein still crackles with life. The slow reveal of the monster has been often imitated but never equaled.
If that’s a little too intense, you can ease into October with a twentieth anniversary screening of the film that brought anime into the mainstream in North America, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away at various Malcos.