Superhero epics, Tom Cruise risking his life, the return of Indiana Jones and the rise of ‘Barbie’ — your complete guide to this year’s incredible summer-movie lineup
Summer’s here! And the time is right for [checks notes] seeing lots of blockbusters, sequels, prequels, threequels, and other big-name movies on IMAX-sized screens! The movies have more or less returned to “normal,” even if public moviegoing itself still feels like it’s in danger of becoming the equivalent of gas lamps and hula hoops. At this year’s Cinema Con — the annual gathering of theater owners, industry wonks, and celebrities pitching their upcoming projects — everyone from Martin Scorsese to Warners CEO David Zaslav reiterated why movie theaters remain a vital part of the equation. And few things will get people out to theaters more than the event movies we associate with the summer-movie season. You could wait to watch the latest superhero epic or Fast & Furious entry or a big eye-candy movie like Barbie on the streaming service of your choice. Or you could go sit in the dark with strangers and have a communal experience, as everyone laughs and cries and becomes immersed in those larger-than-life images.
Many of the 40 movies we’ve singled out for this list definitely fit in the best-seen-on-biggest-screens-possible category, and fit the traditional idea of what gets released between Memorial Day and Labor Day. There are also a handful of prestige films that feel like excellent summer counterprogramming — looking at you, Oppenheimer — and some “smaller” comedies and dramas and docs that are definitely worth leaving the house for. One of them is even our early pick for the best film of 2023. All of them are designed to thrill you, move you, and/or give you that popcorn and air-conditioning rush. (And, of course, dates are subject to change.)
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‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ (May 5)
Image Credit: Marvel Studios Marvel’s resident band of interstellar misfits returns for one final Guardians jaunt through the galaxy. (This is the MCU we’re talking about, though, so take that “final” bit with a boulder-size grain of salt.) Director James Gunn locks and loads one last epic cosmos-hopping adventure, which gives us an origin story for Rocket Raccoon, brings Zoe Saldaña’s Gamora back from the dead, and introduces both the villain known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) and the fan-favorite antihero Adam Warlock (Midsommar‘s Will Poulter) — a big deal if you grew up reading comic books in the 1970s. Expect an end-credits sequence or two, both cheesy classic-rock tunes and some ’90s tracks like Radiohead’s “Creep” dotting the soundtrack, and some extremely sentimental farewells.
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‘Blackberry’ (May 12)
Image Credit: IFC Films Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin were two Canadians with a dream: to create an unprecedented mobile device that would allow you to send and receive emails, text your friends, and make phone calls. Thanks to some help from a businessman named Jim Basillie, their company Research in Motion created the Blackberry, and lo! A revolution was born. Writer-director-star Matt Johnson (he plays Doug) gives us the origin story of the first smartphone, and how this tiny device caused a huge tech-innovation ripple, made people a shit-ton of money, and destroyed several livelihoods and lifelong friendships. Think The Social Network, but smaller and with the equivalent of a minuscule keyboard attached. Also starring Jay Baruchel as Lazaridis and a damn near unrecognizable Glenn Howerton as a cutthroat, take-no-prisoners version of Basillie.
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‘Hypnotic’ (May 12)
Robert Rodriguez returns with this tale of an Austin-based detective (Ben Affleck) whose child goes missing. Desperate to throw himself into work as a distraction, he begins investigating a series of bank robberies connected by a mystery man (The Dark Knight‘s William Fichtner) and hypnotic suggestions that double as a form of mind control. What’s even weirder: This gent may hold the answer to what happened to the cop’s kid. The trailer is giving us some serious Inception vibes.
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‘Knights of the Zodiac’ (May 12)
Image Credit: Toei Animation Based on the Japanese manga Saint Seiya, this bid for a new big-budget fantasy franchise pits the reincarnation of Athena (Madison Iseman) and the young man recruited to be her celestial bodyguard (Mackenyu) against a group of enemies led by a particularly evil Famke Janssen. The good folks at Toei Animation, who partnered with Sony to adapt the popular comic, have been working on this live-action spectacle for close to a decade.
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‘The Mother’ (May 12)
Image Credit: Eric Milner/Netflix It’s time for J-Lo, Action Hero, with Jennifer Lopez playing a former Army sharpshooter recruited for off-the-books operations. She’s eventually forced to go underground and give up her newborn baby when her enemies come after her. Twelve years later, the bad guys decide to go after the now-tween daughter (Lucy Paez), and … let’s just say that Jenny from the Block has a very particular set of skills. Skills that make this very protective-from-afar mother a nightmare for people like them. Niki Caro (Whale Rider) directs.
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‘STILL: A Michael J. Fox Story’ (May 12)
Image Credit: AppleTV+ Before he was 20 years old, Michael J. Fox was a working actor. Before he turned 25, he was on one of the most popular TV shows in America and had just become a freshly minted movie star. By the time he was 30, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which would slow down his career — but would not stop him. Documentarian Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) chronicles Fox’s life and work, from leaving Canada for Hollywood to becoming an activist and advocate for finding a cure for his illness.
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‘Fast X’ (May 19)
Image Credit: Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures What do the creators of the 10th official entry in the Fast & Furious franchise have in store for us, you ask? Well, what do you think? Cars! Outrageous, physics-defying stunts! Diesel — both the actor and the fuel! Fastness! Furiousness! Family!!! The ol’ F&F gang’s all here (minus Dwayne Johnson because, well, you know), including marquee-name series stalwarts like Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren, and John Cena. Also joining in on the fun this time is Jason Momoa as a very bad dude and Rita Moreno as Grandma Toretto.
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‘Master Gardener’ (May 19)
Writer-director Paul Scharder (First Reformed) gives us another one of his monastic, God’s-Lonely-Man types — in this case, a gardener named Narvel (Joel Edgerton) with a checkered past, who tends to the vast, lush grounds of a New Orleans socialite (Sigourney Weaver). When he’s asked to mentor her grand-niece (Quintessa Swindell), however, his carefully composed life begins to come apart at the seams.
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‘The Little Mermaid’ (May 26)
Image Credit: DISNEY Remember when racist right-winger shit-heels lost their minds over the notion of a Black mermaid when Disney dropped the trailer for this live-action adaptation of its animated classic? There’s something even more poignant now about seeing Halle Bailey singing “Part of Your World,” and we couldn’t think of a better casting coup than getting one half of Chloe x Halle to portray this generation’s Ariel. Director Rob Marshall is no slouch when it comes to movie-musicals (Chicago) or Disney joints (Mary Poppins Returns), and the supporting cast is solid gold: Javier Bardem as Triton, Melissa McCarthy as Ursula (!!!), and Daveed Diggs and Awkwafina voicing Sebastian and Scuttle, respectively.
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‘The Machine’ (May 26)
Image Credit: Alek Sandarletic Maybe you’ve heard frequently shirtless stand-up comic — and former hardest-partying college student in the United States of America — Bert Kreischer talk about how he fell in with some Russian mafia types while traveling in Moscow during his school days. It’s a genuinely wild story, and now Bert and director Peter Atencio bring that chapter of his life to the big screen. It also threads in a fictional (we hope!) plotline about how, 20 years after hanging with those Eastern European tough guys, Kreischer and his dad (played by Mark Hamill) are kidnapped by the same mobsters and have to fight their way to freedom. This looks wild.
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‘You Hurt My Feelings’ (May 26)
Image Credit: A24 The last time writer-director Nicole Holofcener and Julia Louis-Dreyfus worked together, they gave us the beautiful, brilliant, and heartbreaking Enough Said — so the bar is set high for their latest collaboration, which centers around a writer finishing a follow-up to a bestselling memoir. She thinks she’s finally got a draft that works after years of trying to get it into shape. Then the author overhears the one person who’s been her confidante and sounding board — i.e., her husband (The Crown’s Tobias Menzies), telling someone that he thinks the new book is … well, frankly, it’s crap. We would genuinely hate to be their couples counselor. Michaela Watkins, Owen Teague, Succession’s Arian Moayed, and the mighty Jeannie Berlin co-star.
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‘The Boogeyman’ (June 2)
Image Credit: 20th Century Studios Horror filmmaker Rob Savage (Host) reaches deep into the Stephen King back catalog — all the way back to the author’s 1978 short-story collection Night Shift, in fact — for this chilling tale of two young women (Sophie Thatcher and Vivien Lyra Blair) mourning the death of their mother. They’re also sensing a malevolent presence lurking around their house, which is getting more and more aggressive. Their dad (Chris Messina) thinks they’re imaging the whole thing. We know better. This looks like a Grade-A creepshow.
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‘Lynch/Oz’ (June 2)
Image Credit: Janus Films David Lynch fanatics will tell you that the director has long been obsessed with The Wizard of Oz; it’s not a coincidence that Isabella Rossellini’s character in Blue Velvet is named Dorothy. And the filmmaker has borrowed a number of elements from it over the years, from the not-so-subtle — see: the homage-filled Wild at Heart — to the downright subliminal. The latest cine-essay/meta-movie-documentary from Alexandre O. Phillippe (78/52, Memory: The Origins of Alien) enlists a host of narrators ranging from RS contributor Amy Nicholson to John Waters to deconstruct and dive deep into the ways Lynch has channeled this beloved Golden Age of Hollywood classic in to his own work. A must for film nerds, Oz-aphiles and anyone who’s wondered why so many of Lynch’s characters wear red shoes.
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‘Past Lives’ (June 2)
Image Credit: A24 Playwright turned filmmaker Celine Song’s debut feature — about two childhood friends from Seoul who try to reconnect in New York after decades apart — is the sort of intimate, character-based movie that’s in perilously short supply now. More importantly, it’s an emotionally resonant wallop of a movie that turns quiet little moments into landmines, and gives the great Greta Lee a role worthy of her talents. Though they swooned over each other as young schoolmates in Seoul, Hae Sung (Decision to Leave‘s Teo Yo) and Nora (Lee) lost touch when she emigrates. The two tentatively reconnect over social media in their twenties, then go radio silent. By the time Hae comes to visit her, Nora is married to a writer (John Magaro), and neither of them know what to do with their unrequited romance. Not for nothing has this already been called “the first great movie of 2023.”
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‘Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse’ (June 2)
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Animation Seriously, why have one Spider-Man — or even three of them — when you can have dozens? The sequel to the standout 2018 animated Spidey movie once again throws Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) into the middle of a whole mess of other web-slingers from alternate universes, all of whom are going up against a dimension-traveling Marvel supervillain known as the Spot. Jake Johnson and Hailee Steinfeld return as Peter Parker, a.k.a. the OG Spidey, and Gwen Stacy, a.k.a. Spider-Gwen. The voice talent this time around also includes Daniel Kaluuya (Spider-Punk), Oscar Isaac (Spider-Man 2099), and Issa Rae (Spider-Woman).
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‘Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis’ (June 7)
Image Credit: Utopia Films In the mid-1960s, Aubrey “Po” Powell met fellow burgeoning hippie Storm Thorgerson in the Cambridge flat of their mutual acquaintances, a.k.a. an up-and-coming psychedelic band with the oddball name Pink Floyd. The two men would eventually form Hipgnosis, the graphic design studio that would give the world some of the greatest album covers ever made. Filmmaker Anton Corbijn — someone who’s very familiar with the power of imagery when it comes to bands — charts the rise and fall of the era-defining visual artists, with everyone from the surviving Floyd gents to Peter Gabriel and Paul McCartney weighing in on the impact this pun-monikered company made on their careers.
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‘Strays’ (June 9)
Image Credit: Chuck Zlotnick/Universal Pictures Reggie is an insanely cheerful Border Terrier who loves his owner, Doug (Will Forte), more than life itself. His human, however, is a perpetually drunk douchebag, which is why he abandons Reggie in the big city. Lost and alone, the poor pooch meets some fellow strays, who get him drunk and inspire him to teach Doug a lesson in respect. Yes, it’s revenge, served up doggy style — and the fact that raunchy canine comedy features Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Randall Park, and Isla Fischer voicing real-life canines being “bad dogs” suggests that you may not want to bring the kids. Let’s just say a lot of things get humped.
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‘Asteroid City’ (June 16)
Image Credit: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features It’s the first of two Wes Anderson movies we’ll be getting in 2023 (the other one is an adaptation of a Roald Dahl anthology named The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, coming in the second half of the year). This ensemble comedy, about a group of folks at a Junior Stargazers’ convention in the 1950s who experience an alien invasion, promises a nice, heavy dose of the filmmaker’s formalistic whimsy. As for the cast, well … [cracks knuckles]: How about Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Hong Chau, Maya Hawke, and Matt Dillon? And that’s not counting the ever-growing Anderson rep-company regulars who are also present and accounted for: Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Liev Scheiber, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe. … Seriously, who’s not in this movie?
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‘The Blackening’ (June 16)
Image Credit: Glen Wilson/Lionsgate There’s an old horror trope that says whenever you’ve got a group of people facing some sort of scary-movie menace, the Black guy usually dies first. Director Tim Story’s clever riff on this cliché gathers together a group of longtime African American friends in a house in the woods, introduces a masked killer and a racist board game into the mix, and forces them to figure out what’s going on before they all get murdered. The tagline is “We can’t all die first” — that alone earns this movie some serious postmodern, genre in-joke bonus points.
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‘Elemental’ (June 16)
Image Credit: Pixar Fire, water, earth, and air — these four elements live in a metropolis known as Element City, albeit in highly segregated neighborhoods. Because, everyone is told, you can’t mix with those that are different than you. Then one day, a fire citizen named Ember (Leah Lewis) meets a water guy named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) and realizes that maybe they aren’t so dissimilar after all. We smell a metaphor of sorts in this latest Pixar joint, which looks to do for nature’s quartet what Inside Out did for the emotional spectrum.
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‘The Flash’ (June 16)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture This solo joint for the fastest man in the DC Extended Universe was just supposed to be a chance to give Ezra Miller’s Scarlet Speedster the spotlight, as well as bring back Michael Keaton’s Batman (!) and integrate his Burton-era take on the character into the modern-day series. We were going to get to see Keaton and Ben Affleck’s Batmen shoot the breeze! Plus a new Supergirl! And there was the possibility that we’d finally get the adaptation of the “Flashpoint” narrative beloved by comic readers. Then, well, there were some delays. And that whole pandemic thing. And a regime change. Oh, and there was there other thing as well. But the word on the street after the movie screened at Cinema Con is that this is one of the greatest superhero movies ever, so — there are a lot of expectations around this now.
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‘No Hard Feelings’ (June 16)
Image Credit: Macall Polay Remember the sheer unpredictability and chaos-reigns of Jennifer Lawrence’s old public appearances? Red carpets, talk shows, awards ceremonies — there was always this funny, unfiltered goofiness and sense of anarchy that the Oscar-winning actor brought to the table, before she matured into a seasoned, more showbiz-savvy pro. The good news is she’s channeling that energy into comedic roles in films like this one, which casts her as an Uber driver who’s in dire financial straits. Which is why she takes a job offer to [ahem] “date” a shy teenage boy (Andrew Barth Feldman), courtesy of the kid’s helicopter parents. This all sounds truly vulgar and hard-R-rated and we can’t fucking wait to see it.
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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ (June 30)
Image Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd. You just can’t keep a good intellectual-property hero down. Yes, Harrison Ford is indeed still cracking bullwhips, punching bad guys, and doing his best to avoid snakes (why does it have to be snakes?!) well into his eighties. And our man Indy returns to don his dusty fedora one more time in order to go after another ancient artifact: a dial “that can change the course of history.” Plot details are scarce, but we do know Phoebe Waller-Bridge is on hand as Indy’s goddaughter; Mads Mikkelsen plays a no-goodnik Nazi; and Antonio Banderas and Boyd Holbrook are along for the ride as well. Director James Mangold (Logan) is calling the shots this time, though Indy creator Steven Spielberg has officially given the movie his personal thumb’s up.
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‘Joy Ride’ (July 7)
Image Credit: Ed Araquel/Lionsgate Adele Lim — the cowriter of Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon — makes her directorial debut with this comedy about four friends (Emily in Paris’ Ashley Park, Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, and Sabrina Wu) who turn a business trip gone wrong into an bonding excursion through Asia. Lim has said that she wanted to make a movie “about women who are messy and thirsty, but have so much heart.” Mission accomplished.
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‘Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning — Part One’ (July 14)
Image Credit: Christian Black/Paramount Pictures Tom Cruise will open this seventh installment of the spy-vs.-spy movie series by doing the most dangerous stunt in the history of motion pictures: jumping a motorcycle off a huge cliff. Are you not entertained?! Watch the Last True Movie Star Standing risk life and limb and film-set insurance premiums repeatedly in the name of giving us, the audience, endless thrills, spill,s and chills is part of why the M:I films have been such a blast to watch. But Mr. Cruise’s cinematic death wish is only part of the reason people keep flocking to see them over the last few decades. They’re also consistently, surprisingly good. And the latest one, which once again pits Ethan Hunt and his comrades at the Impossible Missions Force against international powers aiming to disrupt the status quo, looks just as action-packed and airtight as its predecessors. The fact that this is only the first part of a two-part saga suggests either blatant marketing ballyhoo or acts as proof that this story is gonna be big.
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‘Theater Camp’ (July 14)
Image Credit: Searchlight Pictures Amos (Dear Evan Hansen‘s Ben Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon) have been best friends forever, and they’ve been counselors together at an upstate New York theater camp for as long as they can remember. When the place’s founder (Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma and a rival camp wants to take the place over, this duo decides there’s only one thing to do: gather those precocious, would-be-thespian kids and put on a show to save the place. Written and directed by Gordon and Nick Lieberman, this theater-geek mockumentary generated a good deal of buzz at Sundance. Every summer needs a sleeper hit, so …
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‘Barbie’ (July 21)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures It was perhaps inevitable that Mattel’s signature doll would get her own movie — what was surprising was that the person making it would be none other than Greta Gerwig. The Lady Bird and Little Women writer-director is said to have come up quite a campy romp centered around the always fashion-forward blonde (Margot Robbie) and roller-skating soulmate Ken (Ryan Gosling). If the trailer is any indication, this should be a gas. The cast also includes Will Ferrell as the CEO of Mattel (no, really!), Simu Liu, Issa Rae, America Ferrera, Hari Nef, Kate McKinnon, and Michael Cera. It should be worth its weight in Malibu Dreamhouses.
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‘Oppenheimer’ (July 21)
Image Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic J. Robert Oppenheimer was a physicist who had studied in Europe and was recruited by the American government to work on a top-secret scientific endeavor known only as “the Manhattan Project.” You likely know him as the father of the atomic bomb, which helped the Allies win World War II … and eventually cost Oppenheimer his soul (and killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese people). Director Christopher Nolan heads up this biopic on one of the game changers of the 20th century. Cillian Murphy plays the conflicted scientist; Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman (as President Harry S. Truman!), and what appears to be half of modern-day Hollywood round out the all-star cast.
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‘They Cloned Tyrone’ (July 21)
Image Credit: PARRISH LEWIS/NETFLIX Some shady things have been going on in the neighborhood lately: unmarked vans, missing persons, rumors about some government experiments and such. So three locals — played by the holy action-comedy trinity of Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris, and John “Attack the Block” Boyega — decide to do a little snooping around, and sure enough, they stumble across a lab, some bodies, and, well … see the title. We’ve got high hopes for this feature-film debut from writer-director Juel Taylor.
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‘Haunted Mansion’ (July 28)
Image Credit: Jalen Marlowe/Disney Yes, this Disney horror-comedy is indeed based on the popular amusement park ride, and filmmaker Justin Simien’s take on the haunted-house movie is likely to include a lot of well-known bits from the Disney World staple. (We counted at least a half-dozen in the trailer alone.) But check out its stacked cast, which includes Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lakeith Standfield, Winona Ryder, Rosario Dawson, Jared Leto, Dan Levy, and Hasan Minhaj. And look, no one expected much from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and look at how those turned out? OK, maybe that’s a bad example now, but you get what we’re saying.
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‘Talk to Me’ (July 30)
Image Credit: A24 Here’s the thing about severed, embalmed hands that can conjure up the dead, kids — you really should not fuck with them. At all. But try telling that to the Australian teens who keep using this supernatural talisman for kicks, until one young woman (Sophie Wilde) takes things a little too far, and the spirits start getting a little more aggressive than usual. It’s not surprising that A24 is putting out this horror movie from twin filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou; it feels completely in sync with the company’s usual creepy, dread-inducing genre flicks.
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‘Passages’ (August 4)
Image Credit: Guy Ferrandis / SBS Productions Writer-director Ira Sachs (Keep the Lights On) turns his lens on a love triangle between, a German director (Franz Rogowski), the younger French woman (Blue Is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos) with whom he’s having an affair, and his husband (Ben Whishaw). Sachs is one of the great unsung heroes of Amerindie filmmaking, and this three-way character study falls right in his signature sweet spot of brutal honesty and pathos-driven humanity. If you’re looking for sex, brilliant men behaving badly, a few swipes at the insular culture of low-budget film sets, and more sex, this is straight-up the movie for you this summer.
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‘Shortcomings’ (August 4)
Image Credit: Sundance Institute. Welcome, Randall Park, to the actors-turned-filmmakers club! The former Fresh Off the Boat star makes his directorial debut with this adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, about a twentysomething dude (After Yang’s Justin H. Min) who manages an arthouse theater in the Bay Area. His girlfriend (Ally Maki) has just taken off to NYC, which leaves our hero alone, lost, and wondering: What do I want to do with my life? Should I keep extending my adolescence into my 30s? Also, what’s on the Criterion Channel right now? The supporting cast includes Sonoya Mizuno, Park’s Veep costar Timothy Simmons, Tavi Gevinson, and Sherry Cola.
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‘Gran Turismo’ (August 11)
Image Credit: Gordon Timpen/Sony Pictures What would happen if you took the greatest Gran Turismo video-game players from around the world, and let them compete for the chance to actually race cars? Would it turn a gamer like Jann (Archie Madekwe), who’s long dreamed of lapping people around real-life tracks, into a champion? And let’s say this is all just a stunt, dreamed up by an oily bigwig (Orlando Bloom): What are the odds that a trainer (David Harbour) could actually turn these console-jockeys into the next Mario Andretti? Kudos to Sony, who are doing some major corporate cross-branding with this based-on-a-true-story underdog sports movie.
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‘Heart of Stone’ (August 11)
Image Credit: Robert Viglasky/Netflix © 2023 In the future, every movie star will play a globetrotting intelligence agent who’s got to make a choice between what’s good and what’s right, all while jumping out of airplanes, riding motorcycles through busy metropolitan streets, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Now it’s Gal Gadot’s turn. She plays Rachel Stone, who’s the best at what she does and soon finds that she has to use espionage skills against those who’ve trained her, yadda yadda yadda. Think Mission: Impossible, but starring Wonder Woman. Netflix is clearly putting a lot of chips on this as a potential franchise-starter.
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‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ (August 11)
Image Credit: Universal Pictures Come aboard the Demeter, a seaworthy vessel shipping out of Romania and bound for late 19th-century London. The crew is a salty one, and well-trained. The passengers on this particular voyage include a doctor (Corey Hawkins) and a young woman (The Nightingale‘s Aisling Franciosi). And among the cargo are two dozen unmarked crates, all of them originating from a castle in Transylvania. Readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula know what happens next, and this horror movie from André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe) turns this tiny bit of legacy vampire-lit lore into a full-blown, terror-on-the-high-seas thriller. Costarring Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham and the always creepy David Dastmalchian.
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‘Blue Beetle’ (August 18)
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures We’ve got a few leftover movies from the old DCEU before James Gunn and Peter Safran remake that particular cinematic universe from the ground up, including the aforementioned Flash film, the long-delayed Aquaman sequel — and the origin story of this semi-obscure superhero, the Blue Beetle. Recent college graduate Jaime Reyes (Cobra Kai standout Xolo Maridueña) is given a mysterious package and told to keep it safe. When he opens it, the contents are nothing more than a scarab-shaped piece of tech … which then attaches itself to Jaime’s face, and gives him an organic exoskeleton complete with insect-like wings. Naturally, some corporate types want this powerful object for themselves and and willing to stop at nothing to get it. A lot of comic-book-type action ensues.
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‘Treasure Boys: A Please Don’t Destroy Movie’ (August 18)
Image Credit: Caro Scarimbolo/NBC You love them on Saturday Night Live, with their wacky digital shorts — now check out Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy in the moving pictures! Veteran SNL director Paul Briganti and producer Judd Apatow will put the Please Don’t Destroy trio through their paces as the guys, who feel like they’re collectively stuck in a rut, decide to go search for long-lost treasure (!) rumored to be buried deep within a local mountain. If it’s half as funny as their surreal sketch-show vignettes, then it will likely be twice as funny as most of the other comedies that come out this year.
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‘Lift’ (August 25)
Image Credit: Christopher Barr/Netflix Ah yes, a good old-fashioned international heist movie! Kevin Hart is a master thief recruited to foil a terrorist attack by staging a robbery on a flight from London to Zurich. Luckily, he’s assembled your usual ragtag group of experts to help him pull this off. Joining him are Jean Reno, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Avatar‘s Sam Worthington, YunJee Kim, Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó, Billy Magnusson, and Vincent D’Onofrio. F. Gary Gray (Set It Off, The Italian Job remake) is the man behind the camera.
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‘They Listen’ (August 25)
Image Credit: Samir Hussein/WireImage; JC Olivera/Getty Images Plot details have been kept under wrapped about this Blumhouse horror film, set to come out in the dog days of the season. We know it stars John Cho and Katherine Waterston; that Chris Weitz is directing, and though he’s mostly known for doing comedies like the American Pie movies and About a Boy, he did also do a Twilight film; and that it has the sort of title that suggests something genuinely sinister and screwed up is about to happen to everyone onscreen. Who, exactly, is they, and why are they listening? You’ll have to wait and see.
2023-05-05 13:09:31