Any investigator will tell you, if a husband or wife is found murdered, always look at the spouse first. Taking the top prize at Cannes was Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, in which Sandra Hüller plays a bisexual novelist and wife who is immediately a suspect when her husband is found dead in the snow.
Hüller, who emerged on the international stage in 2016’s Toni Erdmann, is joined in the cast by Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner, Antoine Reinartz, Samuel Theis, Jehnny Beth, Saadia Bentaïeb, Camille Rutherford, Anne Rotger, and Sophie Fillières.
Triet co-wrote the screenplay with her own spouse, filmmaker Arthur Harari. The two previously worked together on 2019’s Sibyl, which also featured Hüller.
Here is the synopsis: For the past year, Sandra, her husband Samuel, and their eleven-year-old son Daniel have lived a secluded life in a remote town in the French Alps. When Samuel is found dead in the snow below their chalet, the police question whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Samuel’s suspicious death is presumed murder, and Sandra becomes the main suspect. What follows is not just an investigation into the circumstances of Samuel’s death but an unsettling psychological journey into the depths of Sandra and Samuel’s conflicted relationship.
Anatomy of a Fall opens in NY and LA on October 13th.
If you know the name Sung Kang it’s probably because you’re a really big fan of 2012’s Bullet to the Head. Just kidding. He’s obviously Han from the Fast & Furious franchise and has made that character his own since debuting it way back in 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow. Yeah, look it up. Anyway, Kang is branching out from the blockbuster world and into filmmaking with his directorial debut, Shaky Shivers, a horror-comedy that has been making noise on the festival circuit.
Kang trades fast cars for werewolves in a film that he directs from a script by Andrew McAllister and Aaron Strongoni. The cast is led by Brooke Markham (In The Dark), VyVy Nguyen (The Sympathizer), Jimmy Bellinger (Blockers), Herschel Sparber (A Goofy Movie), Skyler Day (Parenthood), and Erin Daniels (House of 1000 Corpses).
Here’s the synopsis: After finding herself bitten by a mysterious animal, Lucy becomes convinced that she will transform into a fearsome werewolf. Joined by her best friend Karen, the two embark on a wild adventure filled with magic and mayhem, as they look to do battle with a throat-slashing creature ripped right out of an 80s horror movie.
Shaky Shivers will open in theaters on September 21st.
It’s been a year since Apple and Legendary announced their partnership to develop a live-action streaming series set in the same Monsterverse where Godzilla and King Kong clash. And now today Apple has dropped some images, plot details, and the 10-episode series’ official title, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
The series is set after the events of 2014’s Godzilla, taking place across multiple generations from the 1950s to the present, as we watch Monarch, the monster tracking organization, from its earliest stages.
In a cool move, Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell will play Army officer Lee Shaw across different time periods. The cast also features Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm, Joe Tippett, and Elisa Lasowski.
Chris Black (Severance) and Marvel vet Matt Fraction (Hawkeye) developed the show, with Matt Shakman directing the first two episodes.
Here’s the series synopsis: Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters are real, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” tracks two siblings following in their father’s footsteps to uncover their family’s connection to the secretive organization known as Monarch. Clues lead them into the world of monsters and ultimately down the rabbit hole to Army officer Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell), taking place in the 1950s and half a century later where Monarch is threatened by what Shaw knows. The dramatic saga – spanning three generations – reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives.
While there’s no release date for Apple TV+ yet, a trailer is likely around the corner and could have that info.
Studios learned long ago that you can’t go wrong with movies featuring talking babies or talking dogs. For some reason, audiences will never get enough of giving them adult mouths with which to spout very juvenile things. For the most part this is done with family-friendly goals, but not so much Strays, a filthy-mouthed canine comedy that features the lowbrow hat trick: potty humor, stoner humor, and dick jokes.
This is both a good and bad thing. Chances are you already know if a film like Strays is for you just by the promos, which promises dogs humping things, peeing on things, and occasionally getting high on wild mushrooms. At least filmmaker Josh Greenbaum (of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar fame) and American Vandal writer Dan Perrault know the four-legged lineage in which their story exists. We’ve all grown up on movies and TV shows featuring heroic canines, Man’s Best Friend, who go on epic journeys to be reunited with their owners, or to save the day at the last possible second. Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Benji, these dogs are iconic for a reason. Well, that’s great and all, but have any of them ever humped a dirty couch? Or bitten a man’s penis off? Pfft! Losers.
That’s the plot of Strays in a doggie bowl. Will Ferrell voices Reggie, a naive Border Collie who doesn’t seem to get that his douchebag owner Doug (Will Forte) doesn’t actually love him. He only kept him as a pet to hurt his ex-girlfriend who loved Reggie dearly. And now that she’s gone, Doug’s a prime candidate for animal cruelty charges. Playing a sick game of “Fetch, Fuck!!” (the expletive when Reggie succeeds) Doug abandons the dog where he can never find his way back home, leaving him lost on an unknown street.
The streets nearly swallow up poor domesticated Reggie, until he meets a street smart Terrier named Bug (Jamie Foxx), who is loving life as a stray. Hey, he can pee on anything he wants (which means he owns it), hump anything he wants (such as a filthy couch voiced by Sofia Vergara), and he doesn’t have to put up with trash humans like Doug. Not that Reggie believes his beloved Doug is such a bad guy. It takes some convincing, and a little help from a posh Australian Shepherd named Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park), an anxious therapy Great Dane sporting one of those unfortunate cones around his head.
Imagine Disney’s The Incredible Journey if it was written by veterinary students on an acid trip. Finally becoming hip to the code of the streets, and to Doug’s true nature, Reggie and his newfound crew go on their own journey…to bite off the one thing Doug cares about most; his penis. Cue up a scene of Forte shaving his pubic hair that you’ll wish you’d never had to endure.
Of course, this trek is fraught with dangerous animal encounters; like hungry hawks, bullying mutts, and squirrels. A trip to a nearby carnival to fetch some eats turns into a horror movie when fireworks start going off. Suddenly turning into the doggy version of Pineapple Express, a meal of mysterious mushrooms triggers a psychedelic head trip that features some fun shifts in style, from animation to puppetry.
There’s nothing at all wholesome about Strays. The F-bombs and pee flow freely, but they’re nothing compared to the amount of literal dog crap on display. A stint in the kennel leads to a poop bonanza that leaves poor Brett Gelman looking like the shit monster from Dogma. It’s a scene, man.
Of course, this type of extreme humor has its limits, and Strays hits it pretty quickly which is when the film starts to grow tiresome. You’ll hope for more of the subversive insights and emotional notes that it occasionally brings. There’s a great joke mocking movies that feature dog narrators telling their own stories. And you’ll genuinely root for Reggie to get some payback, because if there’s one thing we all can agree on is that owners like Doug deserve the worst. Each of the dogs has their own issue to overcome, whether it be a lack of self-confidence, past abuse, fear of being replaced, and even PTSD. None of this is particularly deep, mind you, and they feel odd when placed next to a dog eating another’s vomit.
But hey, who goes to Strays for emotional depth, anyway? At least it doesn’t just roll over and play dead. Humans eff around, and they quickly find out that Man’s Best Friend has a pretty sick sense of humor.
Sundance is littered with promising filmmakers who return to the festival, after making a name for themselves by having a distinct voice, only to misfire with a broad adaptation that stifles said voice. Fortunately for Thoroughbreds and Bad Education director Cory Finley, he has avoided this worrying trend with the ambitious and delightfully weird Landscape with Invisible Hand, an adaptation of M.T. Anderson’s novel many have deemed unfilmable. Gone are the acidic tone and devious-but-likable characters, in favor of a tone more akin to an episode of Outer Limits.
True to its title, the film’s scenes are staged by artist renditions over various types of canvas. These paintings introduce us to the Costello family over the course of a few years in the near future. Adam (Asante Blackk) is a genuinely good kid. A teenager with a gift for art, he’s the eldest child to Mrs. Costello (Tiffany Haddish), who was left a single parent when her husband (William Jackson Harper) abandoned them after the alien Vuuv invasion.
Oh yeah, this is an alien invasion movie, but don’t expect laser guns and warfare to follow. Instead, we’re shown, again through artist depiction, that after some initial resistance, humanity’s corporate leaders basically rolled over to the Vuuv because…well, money. The Vuuv, who resemble uncooked chicken that’s been stuffed with a shoebox, have been imposing their will ever since, ostensibly for peaceful means. The actual impact is a slow decimation of human society. Students are taught whatever the Vuuv want them to learn through little nodes on their heads. “I’ve been underbid by the little boxes on your foreheads,” says one of their teachers, moments before blowing his brains out in the school courtyard.
But the Vuuv are also obsessed with human culture, in particular love. They watch classic 1950s sitcoms and imagine that as the ideal version of humanity. The Vuuv, who do not practice sex or romantic love, also enjoy watching humans fall in love and pay handsomely for couples to transmit their dates to be watched like episodes of television. With job opportunities scarce and poverty always a threat, Adam agrees to transmit his budding romance with Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers), a cute new girl in town whose hard-luck family (which includes Josh Hamilton as the patriarch and Michael Gandolfini as his bigoted son) is staying in the Costellos’ basement.
From here, Finley introduces a number of crazy ideas while also taking some big swings at social commentary. Some of it is pretty skillful, like the classism and racism that still exist even when the far more obvious threat to humanity are the aliens destroying everything in plain sight. There’s a powder keg of emotion building up in the Costello household as the power dynamic shifts, with each family using the Vuuv to gain the upper hand on the other. Once the Vuuv begin to disapprove of Adam and Chloe’s courtship, Finley introduces a clunky legal storyline that isn’t as fun as it should’ve been. But the humor picks up when one of the Vuuv actually moves in and begins making declarations to Mrs. Marsh, “Our home should replicate this!!”, it says pointing at what looks like an episode of Father Knows Best.
Finley establishes a fun, loopy tone, but this isn’t a laugh-out-loud kind of movie. It’s just really odd and clever, and should find an audience who like their sci-fi on the weird side. Landscape with Invisible Hand is no fine work of art, but it shows that Finley is unafraid to take risks and try something new. If every ambitious effort is as successful as this, his movies will always be worth looking forward to.
Landscape with InvisibleHand opens in theaters on August 18th.
Being a featured player on SNL has become an easy launching pad into feature films. The list of stars to emerge from the sketch show is long, and now you can add comedy troupe Please Don’t Destroy to that list. The trio known for their popular digital shorts have revealed the first look at their upcoming comedy, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, due to hit Peacock in November.
All three members of Please Don’t Destroy; Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall, star as co-workers and best friends who trek into the forest to find an ancient treasure. Of course, things go comically awry, as they face strange beasts, cult leaders, and more.
The film is directed by Paul Briganti, who helmed the trio’s “Three Sad Virgins’ sketch, and features appearances by Bowen Yang, Conan O’Brien, Meg Statler, X Mayo, Sunita Mani and more.
Here’s the synopsis: In PLEASE DON’T DESTROY: THE TREASURE OF FOGGY MOUNTAIN, John Goodman narrates the adventure of Ben, Martin, and John, three childhood friends turned deadbeat co-workers, who fend off hairless bears, desperate park rangers (Meg Stalter and X Mayo) and a hypocritical cult leader (Bowen Yang) in the hopes of finding a priceless treasure, only to discover that finding the treasure is the easiest part of their journey. Oh, and Conan O’Brien plays Ben’s dad in it.
The Treasure of Foggy Mountain hits Peacock on November 17th.
Like most people when they saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as soon as it was over I immediately wanted the next movie. The idea of waiting a year for the end of Miles Morales’ story was just too painful to consider. Unfortunately, waiting is what we’ll all be doing, and for longer than we hoped. Sony Pictures has already removed Beyond the Spider-Verse from the schedule, and right now it doesn’t look like we’ll see the third movie in 2024.
While that’s disappointing news, producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller Do offer a bit of upside in an interview with Digital Spy. With so much riding on Beyond the Spider-Verse living up to its predecessors, time is being taken to make sure it’s as good as it possibly can be…
“Those conversations are thankfully above our paygrade, but I can tell you we’re already hard at work on it, and we’ll take the time it takes to make it great,” Lord said.
Miller added, “What we’re trying to accomplish with the film is have it be the most satisfying conclusion to the story than it can be, and take it to places that you haven’t been before. And make you laugh and cry, and cheer and think.”
There’s a lot that factors into the sequel’s delay. Of course, there are the WGA and SAG strikes that have ground Hollywood to a halt. But the most controversial reason is a report from anonymous VFX animators on the film who say they are being overworked by producers and it’ll be impossible to hit the previous March 2024 date.
Basically, we’ll get Beyond the Spider-Verse when we get it, and hopefully it’ll be as great as we need it to be. They simply can’t drop the ball now.
I know what you’re thinking. Not another DC superhero movie! There’s been three of them already this year and frankly they weren’t very good. But don’t let that steer you away from Blue Beetle, quite simply the best DC movie in years, and should be the blueprint for James Gunn as he moves forward with the new DCU.
After years of jarring multiverse movies, Blue Beetle arrives with a simple, down to earth formula that should be appealing to audiences of all ages. Cobra Kai actor Xolo Mariduena plays Jaime Reyes, who gains a powerful suit of armor when he comes in contact with an alien scarab, becoming like the big blue version of Iron Man. Susan Sarandon stars as Victoria Kord, your classic corrupt corporate villain with sinister plans to use the scarab to launch an army of super soldiers.
Blue Beetle is the first major comic book movie featuring a Latino lead, and wisely it is inextricably linked to Jaime’s character and strength as a hero. A heavy focus on family introduces us to the colorful Reyes clan, whose hard work and devotion to faith and culture has taught Jaime everything he knows, but also put them in the crosshairs of Kord’s imperialistic motives.
Directed with verve by Angel Manuel Soto of the terrific Baltimore motorcyle drama Charm City Kings, Blue Beetle is also an arresting and deeply emotional story. Jaime learns that to be a hero requries sacrifice, and while a lot of his origin story has echoes of Spider-Man, we’ve not seen anything quite like the closeness of the Reyes clan. This might be a solo superhero story for Jaime Reyes, but it is most definitely a family affair.
Soto does a brilliant job of giving Blue Beetle his own city to protect, and much like Metropolis and Gotham, it has a personality all of its own. The divide between the haves and have-nots is clear, with one portion of the city resembling sporting furturistic elements (almost like San Fransokyo in Big Hero 6) and the other similar to migrant communities in East L.A. Immediately, giving Jaime a home to watch over puts him on the same tier as DC’s top heroes, but more importantly he feels like a part of that community and not just someone who exists in it.
This being my first exposure to Xolo Mariduena, I think the kid is the real deal. He’s got charisma, presence, and while most of the laughs are saved for George Lopez as his resourceful uncle Rudy or Belissa Escobedo as Jaime’s sister Milagro, Mariduena is no slouch himself. Things get very heavy emotionally and it’s all spread among the talented supporting cast, which includes Damian Alcazar as Jaime’s hard-working father, Elpidia Carrillo as Jaime’s mother, and Adriana Barraza having the most fun of her life as Nana, Jaime’s grandmother who has some really fun secrets in her past. When are we getting the Nana solo series on MAX, huh?
DC Comics enthusiasts will go nuts for the way they weave in much of the Blue Beetle lore, with references to the original holder of the mantle, and also Jaime’s predecessor, Ted Kord. While I personally could’ve used more of Raoul Max Trujillo as Carapax, as well as better use of the devastating OMACs, it’s hard to argue that Blue Beetle isn’t put through the paces here. He gets a Hell of a fight that, when it’s over, we truly see him as worthy of the scarab and being the new Blue Beetle.
My concern is that the DC franchise has been soured to such an extend that it doesn’t matter what any of us says. All of the recent movies that have flopped (including Black Adam) were praised prior to release, only to have audiences largely turn up their noses. Warner Bros. has done a good job in targeting the Latino community in their marketing, and my hope is that they will turn out in droves to support such a great and deserving film. And if that’s the case, then the good buzz will drive others to check out Blue Beetleand get on the bandwagon, too.
Blue Beetle opens in theaters on August 18th, and be sure you stick around through the credits.
Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was practically made to be an anime series. Sure, the cartoony graphic novel was adapted into an amazing (tied for my favorite movie ever) 2010 live-action movie directed by Edgar Wright, but Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off looks absolutely perfect! Scott’s dating a teenager! Toast makes you gain weight! Let’s go!
The series brings back all of the actors from the 2010 movie to provide the voices, which makes sense when you consider it’s a beloved favorite. The chaotic video game style of the source material is captured, as well, based on what we’re seeing from Netflix’s new teaser.
O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski (Are You Afraid of the Dark?) co-showrun the series, with Wright aboard as an exec-producer and Abel Gongora (Star Wars: Visions) directing. Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Satya Bhabha, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Alison Pill, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, Johnny Simmons, Mark Webber, Mae Whitman, and Ellen Wong are all back voicing their characters from the movie.
Here’s the synopsis: Scott Pilgrim meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers, but learns he must defeat her seven evil exes in order to date her. Then things get even more complicated. Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hits Netflix on November 17th with eight total episodes.
It’s been a long time coming the wait for Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger, a remake of the TROMA cult classic. But that wait is over. With the announcement of the film premiering at next mont’s FantasticFest, we have the first look at Peter Dinklage as Toxie!
While the image is deliberately masked in fog and shadow, it’s still a pretty good shot of Dinklage as the Toxic Avenger. With Dinklage as Winston Gooze, the cast also features Jacob Tremblay as Winston’s son, Taylour Paige as female lead JJ Doherty, Kevin Bacon as the villain, plus roles for Elijah Wood, Julia Davis, Sarah Niles, Jane Levy, Johnny Coyne, and Blair himself.
The story centers on Winston Gooze, a stereotypical weakling working as a janitor at Garb-X health club. When he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness that can only be cured by an expensive treatment his greedy employers won’t pay for, Winston decides to rob the place, only to fall into a vat of toxic chemicals that transform him into a deformed monster. Now as the Toxic Avenger he sets out to do good and get payback on those who wronged him.
Blair also wrote the screenplay, and the film uses practical effects that have already earned it an ‘R’ rating, which will please its many gore fans. So far, The Toxic Avenger has yet to gain a release date following its world premiere on September 21st.
