THE WEEKEND WARRIOR March 21, 2025

SNOW WHITE, THE ALTO KNIGHTS, MAGAZINE DREAMS, ASH, LOCKED, BOB TREVINO LIKES IT, HOOD WITCH

March grinds along with at least five new wide or moderate releases, but at least this week also sees the release of a prospective new Disney blockbuster based on one of the studio’s beloved vintage animated films, one that was produced by Walt Disney himself, no less. If the movie doesn’t get hobbled by all the controversy surrounding its stars, maybe it will be the next 2025 movie to cross the $100 million mark, because so far…. There has only been one. 😮

And despite what I said last week, I’m going to keep this column in front of the paywall, although you might notice that it’s a day later than usual, because I wanted to include a couple reviews that were embargoed until Wednesday. Right now, I don’t really know what’s going on with my life, but I’ll keep trying to crank out something here at least once a week, although I have a feeling I’ll need a week off before the summer, because I really need to focus on paying work.

SNOW WHITE (Disney)

The big movie of the week and possibly even the month is this new take on Snow White from Disney, who hasn’t really been playing in that Brothers Grimm sandlot as much as other studios and filmmakers have been. With the studio’s continued directive to turn all of their beloved animated movies into live action films, which has led to massive blockbusters like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King remakes, they go back even further this time, to the 1937 beloved classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which was produced by the one and only Walt Disney, who received an honorary Oscar for that groundbreaking film.

This one stars Rachel Zegler from the 2023 hit The Hunger Games: The Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes and Spielberg’s West Side Story in the title role with Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman herself, as the Evil Queen. It’s strong casting for sure, considering how well their earlier films have done at the box office, especially with Gadot also being a regular in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. At this point, I can honestly say that I have no idea whether her character in that franchise is alive or dead – it’s all very confusing.

Directing the movie is Marc Webb, a director who has followed his early breakout Sundance debut (500) Days of Summer with a career that’s been rather hit or miss. Webb did take over the Spider-Man franchise for The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, which didn’t do as well as the earlier Raimi films or the ones after Marvel Studios took over. Webb followed those with two smaller movies in 2017, Gifted and The Only Living Boy in New York, and then, he disappeared into television for a while.

Snow White’s love interest, Jonathan, is played by Andrew Burlap, a TV actor I’d never heard of, and the only other big name in the cast is Titus Burgess, voicing a dwarf, which brings us to the very first of many controversies surrounding the movie, including one of the top actors who is also a little person, Peter Dinklage, calling the film out for not casting actual little people actors. That’s fair, but things got worse more recently with star Rachel Zegler speaking out about a number of things, particularly Palestine, which is likely to have put her at odds with the Israel-born Gadot. Zegler was also called out more recently when she spoke out about the newly-elected President, which had many conservatives calling for her head, which certainly won’t help this movie with those who put their politics ahead of a religion. There’s also the whole outrage about the “woke” casting of a Latina Snow White, but we won’t get into that.

Disney delayed the movie for a full year long before these controversies, presumably due to the actors and writers strikes, which may have slowed down production, but in the last month, they’ve really stepped up the marketing with Zegler and Gadot appearing at various places, including presenting at the Oscars, but barely even looking at each other. Zegler has been out meeting the kiddies and singing a few songs from the movie live, and honestly, that’s probably going to be more important to the little girls (and older women) who love Disney princesses.

Instead of just spouting off comparisons about Disney’s other live action adaptations, I’m sharing some of that information below, and you can see that the boom of these movies took place between 2017 and 2019, though the first two of those, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book were two adaptations of the Disney classics ala Snow White. (Note that both the Mulan and Robert Zemeckis Pinocchio movies ended up going straight to Disney+ due to COVID.)

Cinderella (3/13/15) - $68.9 million opening in 3,845 theaters
$201.1 million domestic, $542.3 million worldwide

The Jungle Book (4/15/16) - $102.6 million opening in 4,028 theaters
$364 million domestic, $951.8 million worldwide

Beauty and The Beast (3/16/17) $174.7 million opening in 4,210 theaters
$504 million domestic, $1.3 billion worldwide

Aladdin (5/22/19) $91.5 million opening in 4,476 theaters
$355.5 million domestic, $1.046 billion worldwide

The Lion King (7/11/19) $191.8 million opening in 4,725 theaters
$543.6 million domestic, $1.66 billion worldwide

The Little Mermaid (5/24) $95.6 million opening in 4,320 theaters
$298.2 million domestic, $569.6 million worldwide

It’s interesting to note that the most recent one of these adaptations was also the one that started a dip in how well these have done, though The Little Mermaid really didn’t do taht much worse than Aladdin, both of them being beloved Disney animated films from the Katzenberg era. That dip might be somewhat worrying for Snow White, especially considering how beloved the original The Little Mermaid has become, and the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarves might not be as familiar to young people.

It’s hard to imagine that most younger viewers who know the character and the fairy tale will care too much for the controversy, but a movie like this generally needs to appeal to teen and older moviegoers as well, and therein lies its biggest problems if they decide to balk at another live action remake.

Whereas this Snow White probably should have opened in the $80 to $100 million range, it’s now in danger of opening closer to the $60 to $70 million range domestically, which is not great, considering its hefty price tag though presumably, it can do huge business overseas where any controversy won’t be as prevalent.

MY REVIEW

THE ALTO KNIGHTS Warner Bros.)

Robert De Niro reunites with Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Levinson for the first time since 2008’s What Just Happened for a new crime thriller that puts De Niro into the dual roles of Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, based on the real-life crime bosses. (Even though Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed was named “Frank Costello,” his character was actually based on Boston mob boss turned informer “Whitey” Bulger, played by Johnny Depp in Black Mass. Oddly, both of those movies were also released by Warner Bros.)

De Niro’s last foray into this world was his reunion with Scorsese, another regular collaborator, for The Irishman in 2021, which was released by Netflix, so there’s no box office data to compare this to. Even though that wasn’t that long ago, it will still be exciting to moviegoers, particularly older guys who won’t care for Snow White, who are likely to want to see De Niro doing more of this kind of movie, rather than comedies.

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. seems to be dumping this pretty decent film without a ton of promotion, even though I did see De Niro appearing on CBS Mornings to promote the film a few weeks back. The fact is that this could have been a movie Warner Bros pushed during awards season, but they really don’t seem to know what they’re doing over there. As one friend put it, “The Alto Knights looks like something that one could wait to watch on streaming.” He might not be alone in that opinion, sadly.

At one point, it seemed like no one even knew this movie existed, and it was destined to bomb with $3 million or less, and maybe that’s the case since the critics have been piling on big time. Having seen it, I think that real movie fans will enjoy it enough to check it out for it to make between $3 and $4 million, which should be enough to get into the top five, though it’s facing a number of returning movies in that same general range.

Mini-Review: It’s been 35 years since Goodfellas and 50 years since the original The Godfather movies, but Robert De Niro doesn’t seem too eager to give up exploring the world of crime that he’s made his signature, his most recent pairing with Scorsese in that realm being The Irishman.

In the movie, he plays the dual role of Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, childhood friends from Little Italy who got into the “rackets” game and spent decades running crime in New York and New Jersey, influencing politics in the bargain. We meet Frank in 1956, as he’s targetted in an assassination attempt by Cosmo Jarvis’ Vincent Gigante, getting away with a grazed skull from the bullet that should have killed him. The hit was put on him by his old pal Vito, who is already in line to take over from the far more passive non-gun-carrying Frank as the “boss of bosses,” but times are changing as the FBI is now realizing that organized crime is everywhere in the United States.

Working from a script by Nicholas Pileggi, who also wrote Goodfellas and Casino, director Barry Levinson has all the pieces to make a classic crime film with the only real onus is that he had to find actors to play the two main roles, who can stand up to each other in the few scenes together. Sure, he could have cast Al Pacino, who has already done just that in Michael Mann’s Heat before co-starring with De Niro in The Irishman, but instead they went for De Niro in the dual role, which really gives the viewer how good an actor he still is, since the two characterizations are quite different from each other.

Most of the film is narrated by Frank, and we do get to see his aged older self a few times as he tells this story, which is something that harks back to Pileggi’s beloved early classics. Either way, this ends up being a fun dual role for De Niro, who gives each of the characters such distinct personalities and line deliveries. The makeup work on De Niro is also terrific, working much better than the CG deaging done for The Irishman. I never realized once while watching this that Frank’s wife Bobbie was played by Debra Messing, who is quite good, but I was even more impressed by Kathrine Narducci as Anna, the woman Vito meets and ends up being sued by for stealing money from her. She’s a real firecracker, and I wish there was more of her in this story.

Despite crime and murder being the main thing driving The Alto Knights, it isn’t completely grim, and has more than a few funny moments, including the “gangster chorus” that chimes in as they watch Frank testifying before a senate hearing and not taking the fifth as everyone else does, and that’s just one of the moments where De Niro’s Vito gets to yell at the screen. Another funny moment involves this

The Alto Knights is another solid true-crime thriller that should appeal to fans of De Niro’s earlier work. You can say that maybe this is no Goodfellas or Casino, but it took many years for Scorsese’s films to be fully appreciated, and the fact that De Niro can pull off such a terrific turn so late in his career (and after making many bad comedies) tells us that he’s still got it.

Rating: 7.5/10

Those are the main two wide releases this weekend, but that hasn’t stopped a number of smaller distributors from getting their movies, primarily festival fare, into theaters nationwide, but most of them will only be in 1,000 theaters or less and struggle to get into the top 10.

MAGAZINE DREAMS (Briarcliff)

A bodybuilding crime-drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival all the way back in January ran into some issues when the film’s star, Jonathan Majors, was convicted of committing violence against his girlfriend a few months later. Majors had also just appeared in two massive releases in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the Michael B. Jordan-directed Creed III, so Majors fall from grace and eventual conviction (and being dropped by his representation). This film, the second from filmmaker Elijah Bynum, was quite well-received months before all of that happened, and many who got to see it out of Sundance (myself included) thought that Majors was destined for an Oscar nomination.

Briarcliff, a studio that rarely shies away from controversy, picked up the movie and is giving it a moderately wide release into roughly 800 or more theaters this weekend with plans to expand if it’s received well. Shockingly, Majors has been doing interviews for the movie, including a number of prominent interviews with the trades, so clearly he’s not shying away from his criminal actions, because he’s probably still proud of his work in the movie as he should be.

There certainly should be some curiosity about the film and though it’s getting a release fairly quickly with little in advance promotion, there should be enough knowledge of the film and curiosity about Majors’ performance that it could make $1 million or slightly more to just sneak into the low end of the Top 10.

Mini-Review: It’s a little strange reviewing a movie that I first watched over two years ago, but never got around to reviewing, especially considering all the subsequent controversy surrounding Majors and how that can only affect one’s views on Elijah Bynum’s movie and the character he plays in it. That’s likely whey Searchlight quickly dropped it months after buying it out of Sundance.

In the film, Majors plays Cillian Maddox, a man obsessed with body building and fitness, wanting to be one of the champions in the sport, but also someone who is so juiced up on steroids that it leads to all sorts of erratic angry behavior that gets worse as the film goes along. Cillian has a crush on the sweet cashier at the supermarket where he works, played by Haley Bennett, and he’s constantly writing letters to champion bodybuilder Brad Vanderhorn (played by actual bodybuilder Michael O’Hearn), hoping for a response he never gets.

Cillian is such a strange character with an equally strange personality where one might wonder whether he has some form of autism, since he seems somewhat dimwitted and unaware of how uncomfortable he’s making those around him. Majors delivers an intense and committed performance that sometimes goes a bit over the top when he’s flipping out and smashing things, and that really is more on Bynum for not having him tone things down.

Comparisons to films like Darren Aronofksy’s The Wrestler and Joker would be apt, as would be to strong kinetic filmmaking like Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash. (It’s almost the antithesis to Aronofsky’s later film, The Whale, only because Maddox is the antithesis of Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-winning character, and it’s kind of crazy to think there was a scenario where the two actors might be competing in the same category.)

If you’ve been paying attention, especially to the title, you might be able to figure out where things are going, but the film gets very dark as Bynum tries to throw in a few too many hot topics, including police racism and the idea of an active shooter, and throwing all those ideas at Cillian, especially as things seem to be getting for him, makes the film’s ending a little confusing, since you’re not quite sure what’s real and what isn’t.

Magazine Dreams is an interesting character study with a truly distinct feel, a solidly-made film with a great score by Jason Hill, but it’s also one that’s hard to fully get behind, just because it plays so different after knowing about its star’s real-life aggressions. It is a true shame how things went down, since there’s an alternate reality where this became another well-deserved Sundance success story.

Rating: 7/10

LOCKED (The Avenue)

Fresh off his title role in Nosferatu, Bill Skarsgård continues his run with “horror” in this film directed by David Yarovesky (Brightburn) and produced by Sam Raimi, in which Skarsgård plays Eddie, who while breaking into a luxury SUV ends up in a deadly trap set by Anthony Hopkins’ William, a vigilante trying to get revenge against the city’s young hoodlums that keep trying to steal his car. Locked will be released into roughly 1,000 theaters on Friday, and honestly, I’m not even sure that will be enough for it to make a million dollars or to get into the top 10.

Mini-Review: Listen, I’m not averse to a lower budget indie thriller that mostly takes place in a single location. There have been some decent ones like Ryan Reynolds’ Buried, and I’m also not one of those people who holds the horrible The Crow fully against Bill Skarsgård. I find he’s a good actor, and this film directed by David Yarovesky definitely gives him room to show off those skills, even though it’s nearly an hour before Hopkins’ character shows up as anything other than a voice in the car’s communication system.

The basic premise is that Skarsgård plays the down-on-his-luck loser, Eddie Barrish, who doesn’t even have the money to get his car back from the repair shop. He needs that car to be able to pick up his daughter from school, because his estranged wife already has enough reasons to hate him. Things are bad, so he turns to the one way he knows he can get some money and that’s through crime. He breaks into a SUV sitting in an abandoned parking lot hoping to find things to sell. When the doors lock on him, he begins freaking out, but he soon learns it’s the masterplan of Hopkins’ William to get revenge on the city’s criminals who have terrorized him and his family for years. William is a vigilante who will get his revenge by making an example of Eddie, whether he deserves the grueling punishment or not. Of course, Williams’ SUV is rigged with cameras and a system to set a huge electrical shock into Eddie if he doesn’t play Williams’ games.

It was long after watching this movie before I realized that it was a remake of a 2019 Argenine film called 4X4 by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. I hadn’t really seen that movie, so it didn’t play a factor in my problems with the movie, other than the fact that MIchael Arlen Ross’ adaptation is such a bad script that I later wondered if there was a possible way to see the original.

Much of the film is watching Eddie struggle with all of Williams’ tortures, and eventually, the SUV moves from its stationary location, and that’s when the film starts to go way too far, such as when William uses the SUV’s auto control to threaten Eddie’s young daughter Sarah (Ashley Cartwright) as she’s walking home from school, and Eddie can only watch in horror from inside the vehicle. Hopkins has proven his ability to play a villain with his many turns as Hannibal Lecter (for which he won an Oscar mind you), but in this case, he’s mostly just a voice on the phone who is just torturing this poor guy with no desire to try to work things out. In that sense, he’s a villain that you can never even remotely feel any empathy for, which means the street criminal is the movie’s protagonist.

The last half hour is definitely the best part of the movie, since that’s at least when Skarsgård and Hopkins are both in the car and interacting directly, but it’s too little too late after sitting through an hour of watching Eddie trying to figure out how to escape, sometimes wondering why he doesn’t just use his celphone to just call someone.

Locked is the type of high-concept premise ala the recent far superior Novocaine that isn’t too hard to get one’s head around, but like Flight Risk earlier this year, it’s also quite stupid. Even worse, it’s quite cruel and never fully delivers as one of the lazier done-in-one-location thrillers in recent memory.

Rating: 5.5/10

ASH (RLJEntertainment)

The directorial debut by musician Flying Lotus stars Eiza González as Riya, who wakes up to find her spaceship crashed on a mysterious planet and the rest of her crew has been slaughtered. When Aaron Paul’s Brion comes to rescue her, she needs to decide whether she can trust them so that they both can survive. Also starring Iko Uwais from The Raid and others, this movie premiered at the SXSW Film Festival a few weeks back and received mostly positive reviews. I started to watch this, but just couldn’t get into it, since it seemed like a fairly by-the-books sci-fi thriller, so I’m probably going to skip reviewing it this week… or will post something on my Letterboxd – you’re all following that, right? Like Locked, it’s also opening in over 1,000 theaters, and I’m just as dubious of this even making a million or getting into the top 10 this weekend.

THE BOX OFFICE CHART

The only thing that is going to keep this week from tanking like so many other weeks is Snow White. Alhough many seem to be lowballing the movie, I think it’s the type of pleant family-friendly Disney movie that can end up surprising, because it’s one of the few movies this year that has a certified name brand that people will know. I was hoping Alto Knights might do better, since Robert De Niro is still a great actor, but hopefully, it will at least be able to break into the top five.

1. Snow White (Disney) - $63.2 million N/A
2. Novocaine (Paramount) - $4.1 million -53%
3. Black Bag (Focus Features) - $4 million -47%
4. Mickey 17 (Warner Bros.) - $3.8 million -50%
5. The Alto Knights (Warner Bros.) - $3.6 million N/A
6. Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel/Disney) - $3.4 million -40%
7. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Ketchup) - $1.9 million -46%
8. Dog Man (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) - $1.6 million -26%
9. Paddington in Peru (Sony) - $1.6 million -29%
10. Magazine Dreams (Briarcliff) - $1.2 million N/A
– Ash (RLJEntertainment) - $900k N/A
– Locked (The Avenue) - $750k N/A

A few of the movies hitting streaming and in limited release this weekend include…

BOB TREVINO LIKES IT (Roadside Attractions)

Tracie Laimon’s indie dramedy has been playing the festival circuit for over a year, winning many jury and audience awards before finally being released this weekend. It stars Barbie Ferreira from HBO’s “Euphoria” as 20-something Lily Trevino, who is struggling with having a difficult and toxic father (played by French Stewart from “3rd Rock from the Sun” though few will recognize him). One day, she finds a stranger online named Bob Trevino, the same name as her father, and she ends up bonding with the man, played by John Leguizamo.

MIni-Review: With everything going on in the world, it feels like a good time for a feel-good movie about two unlikely friends, and as someone who personally has found some of my best friends in the most unlikely of places, I felt like this was an effort I could get behind, especially since I have enjoyed previous work by the two main stars. I was also intrigued by the fact that it had received so much festival love, including both the jury prize and the audience award at the 2024 SXSW Award, as well as winning the top prize at Kansas’ Tallgrass Film Festival, which sadly, I’ll never be able to attend.

That aside, the plot involves Ferreira’s troubled young Lily, whose problem are made worse by having an absolutely horrible father who never has his daughter’s back, since he’s more concerned about his dating life. After a falling out, Lily and her father Bob go their separate ways, but Lily then discovers a “Bob Trevino” on Facebook, which isn’t her father but an older construction manager played by John Leguizamo. They become fast friends who live too far away from each other to regularly get together, but at a certain time, Lily feels that she has found a much better “Bob Trevino” than her actual father.

On paper, this should have worked, but Ferreira’s character is just so annoyingly needy and whiny, essentially crying herself through the story, that one frequently questions whether there’s supposed to be anything even remotely humorous or enjoyable about watching Lily’s journey.

This is not the first indie that purports itself to be a comedy without there being anything particularly funny about any of it, although Laimon tries her best to get audiences on board by putting Lily into different situations that end up doing very little to further her story. Beyond that, Leguizamo has delivered far better performances in smaller indies like this, and there’s just no chemistry between him and Ferreira. Stewart plays such an awful person in the other title character that one wonders why Lily even bothers to try reconnecting with him.

Although this is not Ms. Laimon’s first feature, there are so many issues that make the film feel like the work of a far-less-experienced filmmaker. For instance, Lily’s wheelchair-bound roommate Daphne (Lauren Spencer) offers very little to the story other than being a sounding board and offering bad advice. Nothing really happens of any consequence in terms of story developments, since it’s simply “Lily’s father is bad so she finds a substitute,” essentially taking “daddy issues” to a whole nother level.

Sadly, Bob Trevino Likes It is the type of twee indie that is perfectly able to please festival audiences when they’re in rooms filled with like-minded individiuals going ga-ga over anything and everything, but it never really offers much beyond that, and once it’s over, you wonder why you bothered wasting your time.

Rating: 5.5/10

HOOD WITCH (Dark Sky Films)

This thriller from director Saïd Belktibia stars Golshifteh Farahani (Extraction, Paterson) as Nour, a French Muslim woman, who regular smuggles exotic animals and goods into the country for her activities as a mystical healer, while also selling them to others in her field. When a “patient” of Nour’s dies tragically, she becomes the victim of an actual witch hunt driven by social media, going on the run while also trying to protect her teen son, Amine.

I’ve already reviewed this film (see below), which will get a limited release in select cities and also will be available via on demand.

MY REVIEW

There are a few other movies I just couldn’t find enough time to watch in order to review this week, though some of these sound quite interesting.

BEING MARIA (Kino Lorber)

This biopic directed by Jessica Palud stars Anamaria Vartolomei (Happening) playing Maria Schneider, the 19-year-old French actress who was cast in Bernardo Bertalucci’s Last Tango in Paris, opposite Marlon Brando (played by Matt Dillon), only to be forced into shooting a sex scene that led to her harrowing assault. It recently played as part of Lincoln Center’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema” and it will open at the Quad Cinema on Friday with Matt Dillon doing QnAs.

THE ASSESSMENT (Magnolia Pictures)

Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen, and Himesh Patel star in Fleur Fortuné’s sci-fi-tinged dramatic thriller with Olsen and Patel playing Mia and Aaryan, a couple who hope to become parents in a world where resources are limited so the government maintains strict control over all reproduction. Gee, that sounds painfully familiar. They’re assigned an assessor named Virginia (Vikander) who moves in with them for seven days to evaluate whether the couple is ready to move forward as parents, but what starts as a simple assessment turns into a nightmare. This sounds like a great premise, and I wish I was able to find time to watch it – maybe I still will – but I wasn’t able to get to it before cranking out this week’s column. Apparently, this one will only be in theaters, which may be how I see it, and you can find out where it’s playing on the official site.

MCVEIGH (Decal)

I saw Mike Ott’s biopic about Timothy McVeigh, starring Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen as the domestic terrorist responsible for the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, and I did write a brief capsule review of it. I didn’t like it, but it’s finally in theaters, so if you are into true crime thrillers and don’t mind being bored to death, than this is the movie for you.

O’DESSA (Hulu)

Hitting Hulu on Thursday is this new musical drama from Geremy Jasper, the filmmaker behind the excellent Patti Cake$, which introduced many of us to Australian actor, Danielle Macdonald. O’Dessa stars Sadie Sink from Stranger Things as a farm girl looking for a cherished family heirloom in a strange and dangerous city where she meets her true love and tries to save his soul. I was hoping to get to this one, but I received the screener too late, so I’ll just be watching on Hulu eventually, I guess.

That’s all for this week – still on hiatus from the repertory round-up, sadly – but next week, we get tons of new movies, some might say too many, including Jason Statham’s reunion with The Beekeeper director David Ayer for A Working Man; the A24 horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn, starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega; Blumhouse’s The Woman in the Yard – presumably not Clint Eastwood’s – as well as The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1, and the Bollywood release, Sikandar. So many movies and literally too little time.