In any given month, when making odds for the movies you want to see, it can often be useful to just look at the cast lists. Certain actors are known for only selecting the best and most interesting film projects. It’s not a foolproof method—good actors make bad movies sometimes—but it’s a fun way to choose.
For instance, the new anthology film Kinds of Kindness features the kind of performers who can be trusted to make good career choices, including Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Hong Chau, and Jesse Plemons. The director, as it happens, is another sure bet: the subversive Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, who recently brought us the brilliant Victorian-era freakout Poor Things.
Kindness is being described as a surrealist satire told in three thematically connected stories, with the performers switching roles and relationships between vignettes. Plemons initially headlines as a corporate lackey in thrall to his sadistic boss (Dafoe), but the narrative soon swerves into strange new territories. Body swapping. Sex cults. Amputations. This sort of thing.
Reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival—where the film got a six-minute standing ovation—bode well. Even the most jaded critics are calling the film shocking, hilarious, and utterly unpredictable.
Another intriguing option for July, in a break-your-heart kind of way: Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot tells of 22 families in East Texas who adopted dozens of traumatized children—mostly Black kids—from the region’s foster care system. The film is based on actual events and you may have already seen this one playing a few weeks back. The independent Angel Studios, known for their Christian films, sponsored free screenings for the Juneteenth holiday.
Film snobs may be scared off by the message-movie aspect here, but advance word is that Possum Trot is a real film, gritty and inspirational. In my experience, Christian-themed movies don’t necessarily suck, they just usually suck. I plan to keep an open mind. Possum Trot tells an important story about the power of community, it features good actors like Nika King and Elizabeth Mitchell, and anyway, the trailer made me ugly-cry.
Finally, from the guilty-pleasure department, the big-budget tornado movie Twisters is expected to be one of the summer’s big blockbusters. Disaster movies are best experienced on the big screen, and we can safely expect improved 21st-century special effects for this one.
The film also stars extremely fit movie star Glen Powell in a damp white t-shirt, and there’s just no arguing with that man’s torso. But the most interesting part, for my dollar, will be to see what this most mainstream of movies does with the climate change elements of the story. Movies are one of the ways we talk to ourselves, as a culture, about what we’re afraid of. What’s the proper tone for a popcorn movie about an imminent existential threat? Let’s find out!
Quick Picks
Kevin Costner’s late-career gamble Horizon: An American Saga—a big, honking, epic Western that should linger in theaters—is the first installment in a four-film series that purports to tell the true history the Old West. American mythology tends to resist rewrites, but maybe we’ll see something new.
The indie coming-of-age drama Janet Planet, concerning complex mother-daughter dynamics in the hippie enclaves of 1990s Massachusetts, is the feature film debut of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. Reviews from the festival circuit are calling this one a must-see.
Based on actual events, the independent drama Sing Sing follows a group of inmates who mount an original stage comedy at the infamous maximum-security prison.
If you like occult thrillers or serial killer movies, the horror film Longlegs is a little bit of both and it’s getting solid early reviews. The heavy is played— inevitably, somehow—by Nicholas Cage.
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