Best Actress winner Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)
There’s plenty of great stuff on the big screen in Memphis, so quit doomscrolling and go see a movie this weekend.
Kinds of Kindness
Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for another absurdist comedy after the triumph of 2023’s Poor Things. They are joined by Jesse Plemons (whose performance earned him a Best Actor nod at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau for a triptych of intertwined stories about love, death, and healing.
A Quiet Place: Day One
The third film in the series goes back to the beginning, which is the end of civilization. Blind space monsters with extremely sensitive hearing land on Earth and start eating up all the tasty people. That’s not so yummy for Lupita Nyong’o, a New Yorker who witnesses the invasion, and must escape very quietly. But don’t worry, she’s got a plan.
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1
Kevin Costner directs Kevin Costner in this epic tale — a saga if you will — of American expansion in the West during the pre- and post-Civil War period. Expect horses, hats, and guns from this highly punctuated title.
Inside Out 2
This brilliant sequel is the biggest box office hit of the year. Head emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) must keep her human Riley (Kensington Tallman) on track as the ravages of puberty take hold, and a new emotion named Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrives at headquarters. Beautifully animated with stealthily profound screenplay, Inside Out 2 is a must-see. (Read my full review, which, spoiler alert, borders on the rapturous.)
Kalki 2898 AD
Malco has been getting a lot of Indian movies over the last couple of years. This one promises to be different. It’s not a Bollywood song-and-dance film, as much as we love them. Kalki 2898 is the most expensive film ever made in India, weighing in at an impressive $6 billion rupees (approximately $72 million). It’s a sci fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology which is intended to kick off a Marvel-style cinematic universe. And it looks pretty cool.
Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.
Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.
The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?
The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.
Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.
On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.
On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.
Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most dissected play, and arguably the greatest work of literature in the English language — despite the fact that it is set not in England, but in Denmark. The texts the Bard was drawing on were already 400 years old when he was writing at the turn of the 17th century, but the story of Amleth, the Viking prince who seeks revenge after his uncle murders his father and marries his mother, is believed to be much older. The original saga is lost to history, but it probably came from Iceland around 900 CE.
The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers and written by the Icelandic poet and musician Sjón, is on some level an attempt to reconstruct that lost story. At times, you can be forgiven if you think it seems like an attempt to adapt Hamlet as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. But one thing is for sure: This is the most Viking work of art in the last thousand years or so.
How Viking are we talking? Burley men raise drinking horns to their liege in fire-lit mead halls. Longboats ferry warriors to raid and pillage. Priests of Odin whip berserkers into a murderous frenzy with guttural death metal chants. It’s constantly snowing, but people are half naked anyway. There are literal dogs of war, and they are literally let slip. A dead hero is set adrift on a burning boat. There’s sex in a volcanic hot spring. Nicole Kidman threatens to eat someone’s heart. Björk instructs the hero on how to acquire a magic sword by fighting an undead barrow-wight. We see Yggdrasil the World Tree framed by the Northern Lights. And, of course, valkyries appear to ride the spirits of dead warriors to Valhalla.
This is not the sanitized, horned-helmet-wearing, Marvel comics Thor vision of Viking-hood. This is blood and mud and ice and pagan gods, and, reader, I am here for it.
Björk taking the Viking thing to the next level.
We meet young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) when his father Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from plundering the English Coast. The fight was hard, and the king sports a nasty sword wound that has him thinking about his mortality. Against the objections of his mother Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Aurvandil decides to initiate Amleth into manhood, so he can be prepared to take his place on the throne if and when the king dies in battle. The ceremony, in which the father and son ingest a psychedelic tea brewed by the shaman/fool Heimir (a gloriously crazed Willem Dafoe), is the first taste of just how bonkers this movie is going to get.
Turns out, Aurvandil was prescient. As they’re leaving the ceremony, the king is bushwhacked by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and young Amleth escapes by sea. As he rows away, he chants his new checklist: 1. Avenge father, 2. rescue mother, 3. kill uncle.
Years later, Amleth has grown into the extremely healthy form of Alexander Skarsgard, whose ab muscles ripple from pulling longboat oars. He’s pillaging with a band of berserkers operating in the land of the Kievan Rus, which is now known as Ukraine. There, he meets a seeress (Björk) who tells him Fjölnir almost immediately lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, where he has set up a new settlement with Gudrún at his side. Ameth stows away on a ship bound for Iceland disguised as a slave, and meets the gloriously named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic sorceress who pledges to help him seek revenge in return for her freedom.
Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy plot revenge.
Eggers creates worlds that follow the mythology of their inhabitants while also offering sly comment on said mythology. Like the Puritan patriarch in The Witch, the evil Fjölnir is exposed as an incompetent braggart. When his men discover a group of warriors slain by the rampaging Amleth, they are convinced their “savage” Christian enemies must be behind it, because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree” — never mind that we’ve just spent the last 90 minutes watching these “civilized” Norsemen rape and pillage everything in sight. Ultimately, everyone is doomed not by their predetermined fates, but by their belief that fate is predetermined.
Eggers is a director with a vision who has been given the kind of budget that lets him explore the outer limits of his talent, and he does not throw away his shot. The Northman is a living, breathing, spitting, farting, blood-spurting trip to cinematic Valhalla.
Bradley Cooper stars as Stan, an ambitious carny who seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who just might be more dangerous than he is.
The United States won the propaganda portion of World War II by emphasizing the better angels of our nature. Our individual freedoms of expression, rule of law, and economic self-determination were superior to the dehumanizing groupthink of the fascists. Later, this same formula was successfully brought to bear on the authoritarian communists of the Soviet Union. But after the war, G.I.s who were fighting for this vision of ultimate human freedom returned home to an imperfect country of widespread economic inequality, racism, and religion-driven patriarchy, where criminals and liars prospered while good people were ground down by the brutalities of capitalism.
It was taboo to talk openly about such things during the triumphal postwar era, but beginning in 1944 with Double Indemnity, the discontents coalesced into a new kind of crime film. For Hollywood, centering the criminal was nothing new; Jimmy Cagney had made a career out of playing charismatic psychopaths in the 1930s. But this movement, which the French dubbed film noir, was something different. Cagney’s gangsters were self-made men, but film noir rejects the idea that we are masters of our own fate. The noir antihero is not empowered by his dreams, but rather brought low by his ambition. The land of opportunity is full of tricksters and confidence men, but the one mark you can never fleece is the mark within.
William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley was first adapted for film in 1947, during the height of the noir movement. Set in the world of cheap carnivals and spiritualist swindlers, it’s an atypical noir. There’s no tough-guy detective, and the femme fatale doesn’t show her cards until the climax. But its spooky world-building and uncompromisingly bleak vision of humanity resonated with director Guillermo del Toro, who adapted the story as his follow-up to his 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water.
The director has said this is his first film without a monster, but that’s not true. The monster wears the face of Bradley Cooper as Stan, a down-on-his-luck drifter who finds work at a traveling carnival, run by Clem (Willem Dafoe). He is befriended by Pete (David Strathairn), a hard-drinking carny who takes pity on the penniless stranger, and whom Stan instantly betrays by sleeping with his wife Zeena (Toni Collette). Pete and Zeena’s spiritualist act once made them the toast of Europe, but now Zeena fleeces the rubes as a psychic and tarot reader while trying to keep Pete from drinking himself to death. Stan hectors Pete into teaching him the secrets of cold-reading a mark. When Pete finally succumbs to alcoholism, Stan steals his book of tricks and absconds with cute fellow carny Molly (Rooney Mara).
We catch up with the couple in New York, where they’re selling out fancy nightclubs every night with a mix of fake mind-reading and mumbo jumbo. When Stan is presented with a particularly rich mark in the person of gangster Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), he seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) into divulging her client’s deepest secrets.
Cooper, playing a part originated by the great Tyrone Power, is perfect. You might think, because he gets the most close-ups, that he’s the hero, but Stan is under no such delusions. He tells Lilith that he’s attracted to her because “You’re no good, just like me.” The genius of the story is how every step down Stan’s path to damnation is just a slight escalation from his last lie. Blanchett plays the Hitchcockian ice queen you always knew she had in her, while Collette is a Cassandra whose warnings of the ruin caused by misusing the tools of a perfectly respectable con are ignored. Also great are Willem Dafoe having the time of his life as a sleazy but articulate carny and Mary Steenburgen as a grieving mother taken in by Stan’s rackets.
Veering from the grubby midway to the resplendent art deco interior of Lilith’s office, Nightmare Alley is visually ravishing. It had the misfortune of being buried at the box office by Spider-Man: No Way Home and Omicron, but hopefully its well-deserved Best Picture nomination will help bring a new audience to this mini masterpiece of neo-noir. After all, Nightmare Alley’s dark vision of America as a utopia for confidence men and carnival barkers has never felt more relevant. Nightmare Alley is streaming on Hulu.
“The Simpsons Already Did It” is a 2002 episode of South Park. Trey Parker wrote the now-classic installment out of frustration, because he was always scrapping good ideas for episodes after someone remembered that The Simpsons had gotten there first. In sci-fi circles, there’s a lesser-known equivalent: “Doctor Who did it,” a recognition that, over the almost 60 years Doctor Who has been on the air, staff writers at the end of their wits have already tried everything. In the 1970s, for example, the Doctor Who serial “The Ark In Space” donated many plot points to Alien, including parasitic, wasp-like creatures who feed on human hosts, and an ending that is uncannily similar to Ridley Scott’s. In “The Deadly Assassin,” the Doctor must enter a computer simulated world called The Matrix to battle a malevolent intelligence that controls the fabric of reality. In 1973, Doctor Who celebrated its tenth anniversary with a very special episode, “The Three Doctors,” in which all three of the actors who had at that time played the regenerating Time Lord teamed up to defeat an ultimate evil.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange separates Spider-Man’s soul from his body.
Which brings us to Spider-Man: No Way Home. Since the new Marvel film just scored the second-biggest opening weekend in history, taking home a dizzying $637 million worldwide as of this writing, I’m going to assume you already know where I’m going with this Doctor Who digression.
The film, directed by Jon Watts, helming his third Spider-Man solo outing, begins immediately after the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. Longtime spider-antagonist J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) uses his paranoid tabloid website TheDailyBugle.net to broadcast a video from the dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaall) outing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as Spider-Man. Peter, having just returned from saving London’s bacon, is intent on exploring his new relationship with MJ (Zendaya) and getting into M.I.T. Instead, he finds himself at the center of a media maelstrom, and the lives of the people around him, like Aunt May (Marisa Tormei), his bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon), and handler Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), are thrown into chaos.
Since Peter knows that the post-Thanos world was set right by the reality bending power of Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) magic, he seeks out help from his super-colleague. But when they try to cast the spell to erase the world’s knowledge of Spider-Man’s identity, Peter’s indecisiveness distracts Strange at the wrong moment, and the universe shudders. Suddenly, Spider-Man is called to fight some villains that are unfamiliar to him — but familiar to us in the real world who have watched nine Spider-movies in the last 20 years.
Wilem Dafoe as The Green Goblin
For, you see, Spider-Man: Far From Home is the result of a long-running dispute that has made many a corporate lawyer’s boat payment. Spider-Man has been the jewel in Marvel’s crown of classic characters since his introduction in 1962. When the company fell on hard times, back in the 1980s, it sold Spidey’s movie rights to stay afloat. This resulted in a series of collapsed projects and lawsuits that stretched over 16 years. Ultimately, Columbia Pictures traded its claim on the James Bond franchise to MGM in exchange for the spider-rights, and parent company Sony footed the bill for the excellent 2002 Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire as the friendly neighborhood webslinger. After three movies, Raimi and Maguire handed the baton to Marc Webb and Andrew Garfield for The Amazing Spider-Man, which was decidedly less than excellent.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger (who is retiring at the end of 2022 to go count his money) had the bright idea to just buy Marvel outright — albeit without Spidey. Disney took the Marvel B-team, the Avengers, and made them the core of a cash machine. Meanwhile, Sony was thrown into crisis when the North Korean government hacked its computers as retaliation for the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, and it was forced to the bargaining table with Disney. After unfathomable amounts of money changed hands, Spider-Man could once again share the screen with other Marvel characters.
Zendaya as MJ flees the paparazzi with Spider-Man.
Far From Home is essentially a reunion show, bringing back familiar faces from the franchise’s multi-corporation evolution. First, there’s Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), who confronts Spidey on the now-mandatory bridge fight scene. Also from the Sam Raimi Spider-years is Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church), and The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). From the Amazing Spider-Man years come Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx), and they’re all confused when they see that the MCU Peter Parker doesn’t look the same as he did when the intellectual property was controlled by Sony.
Surprise! Doctor Strange’s magic also brought Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, both sporting their respective spider-jammies, to Earth C-53, and the aforementioned classic Doctor Who episode breaks out. If it ain’t spider-broke, don’t spider-fix it!
Seeing the three Spideys together, it’s safe to say the hero has had good luck with casting. Maguire, nowadays mostly a producer, exudes emo gravitas. Garfield, saddled with bad scripts and indifferent direction during his tenure, blossomed as an actor in his post-superhero career. He looks like he’s having the most fun. Holland, meanwhile, tries valiantly to hold the whole mess together, one reaction shot at a time. On the other side, the always brilliant Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe deliver better than the material deserves. Meanwhile, current it-girl Zendaya outshines everyone whenever she and Holland scheme together to, as Doctor Strange says, “Scooby Doo this shit.”
As a stand-alone work, No Way Home can’t match either the Raimi-Maguire era or even Holland’s first outing, Homecoming. But the film, which just had the second biggest opening box office weekend of all time and is being hailed as the savior of the theatrical experience, is better understood as the successful culmination of a decades-long branding exercise by the two largest intellectual property conglomerates on the planet. Hooray for Hollywood!
It’s a neat trick in storytelling to have emotions come in late. Frontload your story with the crassness of everyday human interaction, then sucker punch the audience in the home stretch with the emotions drama usually has from the start. Comedies like Withnail and I or In the Loop do it. It mirrors how life is: Your routine predominates, but entropy leaks it away to reveal passion or despair.
Sean Baker’s breakout hit Tangerine pulled this off well, sketching a comic, over-the-top Los Angeles skid row but slowly winding its way to the emotional concerns of its lead prostitutes and john. Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, is longer and more pastel, with twice the scenes that veer into humorous non sequiturs about life in the cheap hotels next to Disney World. This time, it’s a little long in the buildup. It keeps its heart off its sleeve almost all throughout.
Our gateways are impish six-year-olds who appear at first as the annoying kids of Magic Castle and Futureland, de facto housing projects originally for tourists. The kids are introduced spitting on a car from a balcony. When its owner threatens to come after them, they tell her, “Go ahead, you ratchet bitch. You are shit” and other phrases humorously beyond their years. They speak mostly in one-sentence jokes and behave like little con men, telling blatantly false sob stories for ice cream money, turning electrical breakers off for fun, and setting an abandoned building on fire. But slowly they become more likeable. Beleaguered apartment manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) shifts from responding to their infractions to being protective, letting their zest for life infect his own.
Both their joy and terror are imitations of little nightmare Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who never stops grifting, but can never pay the rent. Halley is the movie’s central figure, resolute against the quieter notes of a more traditional struggling film mom. She sells thrift perfume in parking lots and steals Disney World passes from her johns. Unlike Tangerine‘s Sin-Dee, who constantly shot off one-liners and whose hard edges eventually showed softness, Halley’s lust for life long ago curdled into self-rationalization. She encourages the kids’ reign of terror.
Bobby also never quite makes the obvious dramatic step of covering for the family and endangering his job. Instead it blinds him. He sneers as he puts Halley’s rent money under UV light and coldly films her vacated room to prevent her from establishing residency. The characters’ place on the cooler end of the spectrum is a clue to the film’s larger themes: People who can’t make money get tossed aside, and those who endanger others’ ability to obtain it are the highest-order threats. This keeps ostensibly good people like Bobby from reacting humanely.
The kids of The Florida Project
The kids are like the free spirits of Daisies, Los Olvidados, Looney Tunes, or the credits suggest, Our Gang. They are less characters than just tiny factories of funny observation and unchecked will. They can only afford one ice cream cone and share it, then fight adults over cleaning up drops. They call asbestos “ghost poop” and free associate pet alligator names. Moonee wipes ketchup on her pillow and declares it her right.
This is a follow-up to a hit in every sense. It has a higher budget, a famous actor, and plays many of the same tricks to less effect. But those tricks are worthwhile. The universe the kids inhabit is tacky: They walk repeatedly through wide shot compositions of rundown tourist traps, one with a giant plastic wizard perched atop. The hotel they live in is purple.
The people are slightly less garish. Is it exploitation? The movie’s wry in how it presents them. It certainly does not give them the level of dignity Moonlight did. Baker has a People of Walmart aesthetic. There’s an element of “look at these crazy poor people and revel in their pluck.” But there is a humanity, even with characters who keep their inner selves hidden and present only hard edges. Late in the story, when Halley gets a hug, she looks bewildered. When one of the kids reacts to the unfairness of her situation, it’s a long, uncomfortable close-up of a crying child — and well-acted. Life does not present itself as a series of speeches but rather as humdrum interactions that reveal themselves piecemeal. Slowly, you learn about a person.
