A filmmaker of that Henry Jaglom/Tom DiCillo/Nicole Holofcener generation of indies serves up a story of a former rom-com director who finds himself applying to work at a cemetery.
Bill Sage stars, with Gia Crovatin, veteran heavy Robert John Burke and
Jennifer Stepanyk, Kim Taff and Kathleen Chalfant from the summer release “Familiar Touch.”
What, no Parker Posey? No James Urbaniak? For old time’s “Henry Fool/Fay Grim” sake?
These days, when a horror movie hits, it HITS. “Sinners” and “Final Destination” now have a third over-performing horror blockbuster in their 2025 ranks.
“Weapons,” the latest from “Barbarian” actor turned director Zack Cregger, is rolling in good reviews and big box office. A Julia Garner/Josh Brolin/Benedict Wong star vehicle — no, none of them is a box office “name” — it’s blowing up with a $41 million+ plus opening weekend, a big fat August blockbuster in the making.
It earned some $18.2 million Friday alone.
A smart, cryptic thriller with more than one interpretation — by design — and great performances by Julia Garner, Josh Brolin and Amy Madigan, this one racked up good advance reviews and the buzz built and here we are — $40-45 million for New Line.
Disney and Jamie Lee Curtis are cashing in on “Freaky Friday” nostalgia, with the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee remake bowling over viewers as “Freakier Friday” rolled up a $12.7 million Friday, pointing to a 30 million+ plus opening weekend. Disney advertised the hell out of this family comedy, and even if the reviews weren’t stellar, there’s no denying the nostalgia, the victory lap for Jamie Lee and a welcome back to the Big Screen for Lindsay Lo, brought back from the cinematic dead by Netflix, with Disney benefiting from that with this August smash.
“Fantastic Four” should pick up another $17 million this weekend..
“The Bad Guys 2” deserves better than a 50-60% falloff and a second weekend of $10-11 million, but it is what it is. Fourth place.
“The Naked Gun: The New Version” is heading towards a second weeked of $8 million or so. Underwhelming. On the screen and at the box office. At this pace, it’s not even going to earn back its advertising budget. The damned TV spots are everywhere. It earned some good reviews…from the “easy lays” of criticism. But I’m an easy laugh and I thought the best gags were given away in the trailer. The theater I saw it in was characterized by the sound of critickets. At least it’s still in the Top Five.
“Superman” falls out of the top five, but it’s due to clear the $330 million mark this weekend. “Jurassic World“ also slides back out of the top five, and is just a few million behind it.
“Together,” a smart body horror thriller that deserves an audience, is slip sliding away, the half-hearted family action fantasy “Sketch” may cling to the top ten.
“F1” will finish its last weekend in the top ten with somewhere around $180 million in the bank.
Adios “Smurfs” (low $30s) and “How to Train Your Dragon” (low $260s), exiting the top ten, sliding off into the August sunset.
“Eddington” cleared $10 million, all-in, and that was that.
As always, I’ll update these figures as more weekend data rolls out Sat. and Sunday.
Gad plays a screenwriter — “I wrote for two seasons on ‘Blue Bloods'” — who ponders who killed somebody and buried them in the walls of the house he grew up in.
His sister is just a tad freaked out by the fact she lost her virginity in that very basement.
A body must be disposed of, blackmail must be faced and a “scary” relative (Anthony Carrigan) must be consulted in this Sept. 19 comic mystery.
Alex Winter of “Bill & Ted” fame directs and co-stars, with Billie Lourd and Chris Candy in the cast for fans of nepo baby actors.
Looks cute, but maybe a hard sell as it has a brief theatrical release followed by VOD a few days later scheduled.
Those Brits and their OAP murder mystery solvers.
Based on a sort of Agatha Christie-lite novel, this looks cute. A couple of Oscar winners and an ex James Bond gives it cachet.
Celia Imrie is the “new” recruit to this crew of “cold case” solving sleuths. Damned if that David Tennant smart-ass isn’t in it, with Naomie Ackie and Daniel Mays among the familiar Brit-film faces in the supporting cast.
Netflix has this Chris Columbus (oy) comic mystery thriller ready for roll out Aug. 28.
David Morse plays Grandpa’s avid angler dad in these reminiscences, with Michael Stahl David, Ximena Romo, Walter Scobell and Cameron Douglas also on board.
This fishing yarn, set in Belize, is a Good Deeds Entertainment release slated to come out Sept. 12.
Glancing back at my review of “Barbarian,” the sinister, smart and sometimes funny blend of scary and silly that became actor-turned-writer/director Zack Cregger’s breakout movie a couple of years back, I’m tempted to repeat myself.
He got “the simple things” right back in 2022, and he hasn’t forgotten that lesson with “Weapons,” his grim, darkly funny and close to heartbreaking follow-up.
“Weapons” is a genre piece that hides which horror genre it traffics in until the later acts. Lile “Barbarian,” its resolution is a lot more straightforward than the mystery it serves up.
It’s very well cast, as great scripts draw in rising stars and big names such as Julia Garner, Benedict Wong and Josh Brolin, with onetime Oscar nominee Amy Madigan, at her most fierce and fearless here.
The most horrific effect in it has nothing to do with the gruesome violence, at least some of which is played for laughs in this film. It’s the sight of grainy, dark doorbell camera and home security CCTV footage of elementary school children, bursting out of houses and fleeing into the night, their arms spread in a kind of pre-flight the for the possible rapture.
One of the most perfectly written voice-over prologues (read by a child) ever tells us the entire story as a way of setting up the action to follow.
“So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Ms. Gandy’s room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark… and they never came back.”
The title is cryptic enough to have fans salivating about its meaning or meanings pre-release. As children who vanish into the night is its horror, it’s a gun violence allegory, adults seemingly “helpless” to stop the loss of schoolchildren to appease firearm profiteers, fearmongers and those unstable enough to hoard such weapons and the politicians who pander to them.
And what’s a consequence of children growing up in a country where the adults can’t won’t keep them safe? Children who are ripe to be “weaponized” themselves.
Garner is perfectly cast as Justine, a kind young teacher with “issues” which start to come to light after almost her entire class of ten year olds vanish at 2:17 that one morning in tiny Maybrook, Pennsylvania.
Brolin is a contractor and father whose son’s vanishing has completely unraveled him. He’s the loudest of the parents shouting for answers, badgering the police chief (Toby Huss), berating the principal (Wong) about “answers” that teacher Justine should provide.
But she can’t. No one can, and that has people raging at her, the school and the cops, who seem as numbed by the shock of it all as everybody else.
The narrative then shifts into flashbacks leading up to that meeting with school and police about the disappearance, flashbacks from six different points of view.
Justine is seen as unsettled but brittle, unable to process emotions about what has happened, which has been something of a Garner specialty since her “Ozark” breakout and follow-ups like “The Assistant.” Justine hits the liquor store, fumes at harassment and tries to renew her love connection with married cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich).
We follow Paul on the job, working for his father-in-law (Huss), going through the motions at work because of a wife ready to get pregnant, avoiding alcohol between “meetings” and bullying suspects because his temper lets him forget there’s a camera in his police cruiser recording his behavior.
Austin Abrams plays the town junkie, and we see him trying every car door, looking for one that’s unlocked, petty pilfering, hitting the pawn shop and shooting up in the woods. But that junkie Paul is quick to threaten and toss around may have some answers.
We see the principal’s (Wong) struggles to make Justine conform to district guidelines about how much contact to have with students, and see his same-sex domestic life as he struggles to get beyond this tragedy that happened, beyond his control but still technically on his watch.
Is there a way of “working” this “problem?” The contractor Brolin plays is letting it all fall apart around him — his business, his marriage. He wakes up in his missing son’s bed most mornings. So he starts his own investigation, which will bring him into contact with all of the others. But will it bring him answers?
And young Cary Christopher plays Alex, the one kid not summoned into the night from that classroom. We see his bullied schooldays, his loving parents and pick up on the disruption that comes to their lives when they take in a desperate, dying aunt (Madigan).
“Weapons” has a lot of structural and thematic elements in common with “Barbarian,” including the way the jolts and twists are handled. The fact that children are involved adds pathos that Cregger’s previous film only touched on briefly.
He brings back Justin Long (as a parent, here) as a “Barbarian” connection, and even added an obscure needle drop from his parents’ era in music as an Easter egg with some pop to it. Back then, it was a Donovan tune. Here, it’s a lesser known work from George Harrison’s post-Beatles masterpiece LP that sets the tone.
In horror, imitation is the sincerest form of filmmaker flattery. And if aspiring frightfilm folks aren’t taking notes on Cregger’s movies, and trying to imitate them, they should be.
Give your script some emotional heft, and don’t be shy about making viewers work to find what they’re supposed to get out of it. Leave them something to chew on as they leave the cinema.
One thing any parent going through the loss of a child has to wrestle with is what they could have done to prevent this. Is this somehow my fault?
With its themes and topical subtexts (the “gun” thing will occur to you before it’s confirmed), with one parent raising a bully who figures into every classmate’s fate, the answer to that “fault” question is a great one for viewers to consider.
Cregger, like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, knows that smart horror is the best horror. And that any horror movie that starts arguments and conversations the moment the credits roll is a winner.
Rating: R, graphic violence, much of it involving children, drug abuse and sex
Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Sarah Paxton, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Justin Long, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan.
Credits: Directed by Zack Cregger. A New Line/Warner Bros. release.
Running time:
It’s adorable that Jamie Lee Curtis spent some of her Oscar-winner capital rejoining Lindsay Lohan for another round of “Freaky Friday” body-switching hijinx. And it’s grand that Lohan survived her most problematic years and that Netflix brought her career back from the dead giving her the option of making this Disney sequel.
For a few moments here and there, the manic giddiness of our leads, revisiting roles from 2003, overwhelms the warm, fuzzy nostalgia of “Freakier Friday,” a movie that puts these two, and one’s daughter and soon-to-be-stepdaughter through that “see the world from your point of view” body-switching thing that the story hangs on.
No, the movie never shakes the feeling that this should have been a direct-to-Disney+ project, despite Curtis winning an Oscar and thus meriting more attention and buzz than it would have otherwise had.
The two new kids (Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons) never quite stick the landing or hold their own with the two old pros. One (Hammons) has a British accent, which she can’t shake when she switches bodies with therapist Grandma Tess (Curtis). And Curtis throwing up her hands at doing the teen’s accent — she’s a British baroness by marriage, for Pete’s sake — really lowers the bar on the entire enterprise.
But there are “old lady” giggles which Curtis leans into, the indignity of having her body inhabited by a confused, callow British high-school expat.
“Why do I have to PEE again?” “What’s WITH all the old tissues in EVERY pocket?”
And Lohan finds the fun in having a teen take over her former teen idol body, a kid trying to learn how to vamp and “flirt” with a 40ish old flame (Chad Michael Murray), a onetime pop starlet who became a talent manager who now relates to her teen idol client (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) better than Mom ever will.
The plot this time around has teen surfer Jordan (Butters, of “The Fabelmans”) resenting onetime-rocker Mom’s love connection to a British restaurateur (Manny Jacincto of “Top Gun: Maverick”). Because she’s in high school with his snobby, posh daughter Lily (Hammons), and they can’t stand each other.
And when they get married, surf-or-die Harper would have to move to London.
Mom’s impending nuptials and granny’s psychotherapist/podcaster interventions don’t get those two together. But the wacky “psychic” (“SNL” alumna Vanessa Bayer) at mom’s bachelorette party senses mom Anna’s and granny’s onetime “switch,” and casts a spell that could impact the kids in the same way.
It does.
Mark Harmon returns, as Tess’s now pickleball-obsessed husband, along with Murray as onetime teen rocker Anna’s crush, the one the body-switched teens try to use to bust up the coming wedding. And Stephen Tobolowsky is back as a teacher not shy about putting the older women in younger girls’ bodies through a stretch of high school hard labor.
But the script isn’t much and the direction — save for a spirited high school bake sale food fight — is lackluster.
And watching Curtis hurl herself at shopping for old age remedies at the drug store, with Lohan straining to keep up, to compensate for the thin entertainment value here can only carry “Freakier” so far, and that leaves us somewhat short of the finish line when all is said and done.
Laughed at the geezer gags. Loved the fact that they chose to do it. Wish they’d held out for a better script.
Rating: PG, the odd bit of rude humor
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons,
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Chad Michael Murray, Eric Reyes Vanessa Bayer, Stephen Tobolowsky and Mark Harmon.
Credits: Directed by Nisha Ganatra, scripted by Jordan Weiss, based on a book by Mary Rodgers and movie characters created by Leslie Dixon and Heather Hach. A Disney release.
Running time: 1:51
I’m just saying.
Jason Momoa had to play “Aquaman” a bunch of times, put in his time in “Dune” and “Fast and Furious” movies and muscle through a season of “Game of Thrones” to build up the clout it took to get “Chief of War,” a unification of Hawaii epic close to his heritage and his heart, on the screen.
And while he might have been more age appropriate during his “Conan the Barbarian” years for his role as a brawny, young war chief of Maui forced to flee a power-mad king to save the island chain from despotism, he still makes a riveting Polynesian man-mountain to build this epic series around.
“Chief of War” is more “Shogun” than “Game of Thrones” — sprawling, East meets West conflict, bloodline intrigues and slashing violence, more scenic than sexual. And Momoa, who co-created, co-wrote and stars in it, ably and easily carries it from Kaua’i to O’ahu, Maui to Hawai’i, Alaska all the way to the Spanish colonial port of Zamboanga.
Chases, battles, and back-stabbings aside, it’s a somewhat lumbering affair, burdened by constant changes of scene and a sea of characters played by less familiar actors that one must keep straight in most every setting. But Momoa and iconic Maori actor Temuera Morrison (“Once Were Warriors,” Boba Fett to “Star Wars” fans, and Aquaman’s dad) as the Chief of War and his megalomanical Maui King Kahekili are able anchors in helping it all make sense.
We meet Ka’iana (Momoa) and his extended family on “quiet” 18th century Kaua’i, where these Maui natives have fled as he decided he could not serve the “prophecy of the bird star” (comet) obsessed king as his war chief. King Kahekili sends an armed party led by the more loyal war chief Namake (Te Kohe Tuhaka) to “summon” Ka’iana.
Ka’iana must be convinced that O’ahu is prepping for war with Maui. But his plan to spare the combatants lots of bloodshed is undermined by slaughter and he realizes this is just part of Kahekili’s plan to unite the island kingdoms under a “chosen one” — himself.
Ka’iana, his brother (Siua Ikale’o) and wife (Te Ao o Hinepehinga) flee, with the chief of war leading their pursuers away from his loved ones. He is destined to be hunted, chased off the islands, rescued by fur traders, taken to Alaska and taught the ways of the “paleskin” and their (English) language and firearms, forced to scheme a way back home and a way to supply an army with muskets to resist the spreading tyranny of Kahekili.
Meanwhile, Ka’ahumanu (Luciane Buchanan of “The Night Agent” and “The New Legends of Monkey”), stumbles across the fleeing Ka’iana before she faces her ever-delayed destiny, a “political” marriage on Hawai’i. She learns English from a paleskin castaway (Benjamin Hoetjes) taken in by her community and puts-off her war chief father’s (Moses Goods) wedding plans for her every way she can.
But the warrior whose wives she is destined to join has a name anyone familiar with Hawaiian history before Don Ho and “Hawaii 5-0.” He is Kamehameha (Kaina Makua), the truest part of this “based on real events” story. And his destiny lies beyond his conflict with his paranoid newly-crowned king (the great Maori character actor Cliff Curtis of the “Walking Dead,” “Avatar” and “Fast and Furious” franchises, and Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine”) and even the predations of Kahekili.
“Chief of War” doesn’t dwell much on the culture clash of the years just after Captain Cook’s ill-fated last trip to Hawai’i. That’s reflected in the unknowns cast in those “paleskin” roles. Momoa and co-creator Thomas Pa’a Sibbett touch on island language — the series is mostly in Hawaian with subtitles, especially in the early eposides — culture, traditions, combat and the universality of 18th century gender roles as Ka’ahumanu debates the English castaway about “gods” that “only men” hear that keep women servile.
She bridles at her father’s insistence that her intervention and counsel is unwanted by the scheming men.
“Your place is with the wives.”
Destiny is a big theme, with a priestess (Roimata Fox) appearing to several characters, fortelling their fates.
“Many paths lead to misery for you. Only one leads to freedom…The Guardian will come!”
The script has its simplistic touches and obvious contrivances. Romance is minimized, with one warrior carrying on a same sex affair before pursuing a more politically astute “match.” A character insisting on “English” from her older and highly-placed father after she herself has mastered the language from the castaway “one year later” is a real eye-roller.
And early chases and skirmishes aside, the series only finds its footing in the most conventional way when the outraged Ka’iana sets out to free a Black shipmate (James Udom) from slavery in a scene straight out of half of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. That’s four episodes in.
There’s plenty of judgement of the white capitalists who threatened Hawai’i, even before this war to unite the islands.
“Common or royal, it makes no difference in a land where money is esteemed above all.”
Buchanan, Morrison, Fox and Sisa Grey, as an islander who took up a new life among the Spaniards and allies herself with Ka’iana, are stand-outs in the cast, with Curtis, Udom, Tuhaka and Ikale’o also making impressions.
But Momoa, a hulking specimen even in his dad-bod years (he turned 46 this month), is the riveting, scowling prescence who holds our interest and this sprawling and historically respectful narrative together.
This is Hawaii as the paradise it was before “paradise” became its travel brand, and this series reminds us of how the adaptable and fiercely independent people there were able to maintain their independence until rich fruit growers and imperialists teamed up to take it over some 100 years later.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, sex
Cast: Jason Momoa, Lucianne Buchanan, Te Ao o Hinepehinga, Te Kohe Tuhaka,
Siua Ikale’o, Sisa Grey, Moses Goods, Benjamin Hoetjes, Erroll Shand, Kaina Makua, Cliff Curtis and Temuera Morrison.
Credits: Created by Jason Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: Nine episodes @:41-60 minutes each.
Marlon Wayans explains the rules, the deal, to Tyriq Withers in this Jordan Peele produced allegory about The Game that Ate Sundays and what it really costs those who play it.
“What are you willing to SACRIFICE?” “EVERY-thing!”
Take that literally in this Justin Tipping film, scripted by Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers and Tipping.
“Concussion ball” leaves a legacy of CTE, ruined joints, limited mobility, surgical scars, painkiller addictions and for what? So Jerry Jones and his ilk can treat you like cannon fodder in their bloody-minded “war” game?
This looks amazing, and on the money.
Sept. 19.
Movie Nation 