The Weekend Warrior May 6, 2022
DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS, HAPPENING, INBETWEEN GIRL, LUX AETERNA, ESCAPE THE FIELD, OPERATION MINCEMEAT and More!
Phew! I cannot believe we got through these past four months with all the craziness with COVID and its variants and how movies were being shuffled around, mostly to little avail. The Batman was always going to do the best of the movies released in the last four months, but there were some nice surprises I didn’t expect like Everything Everywhere All at Once and for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to be even bigger than the first movie. It definitely seems like while the pandemic rages on, the fear of going to movie theaters has somewhat subsided – unfortunately, the laziness pandemic is still in full effect, but that’s not going to have much of an effect on this weekend’s big release. Also, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday (great timing, huh?), so that could have a slight impact on a few movies. Other things going on have made it a bit tougher to get this column done. I didn’t get to watch nearly as much as I had planned to, and my thoughts on most of the movies I have seen will be shorter than usual.
This week’s column is brought to you by Modern English’s “After the Rain” and The Cure’s “Pornography,” two pivotal post-punk records both released this week 40 years ago! Maybe these records aren’t the Velvet Underground or Stooges, but boy, did they have a huge influence on a lot of the music I love in the forty years since then.
DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS (Disney/Marvel Studios)
As long as we can all agree that Morbius was not REALLY a Marvel movie despite having the “In Association with” logo in front of it (and a stupid cameo by Michael Keaton), this is officially the first Marvel Studios movie of the year. It’s also the first actual Marvel sequel since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, since the last three Marvel movies were about introducing new characters or finally giving Black Widow her solo spotlight, or Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was basically a way for Sony to print money with the help of Marvel’s Kevin Feige and former CEO, Amy Pascal. Not that I’m complaining since No Way Home helped resuscitate the box office, which as you probably know, is my bread and butter and jam.
Although Doctor Strange appeared in a few of those movies mentioned and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is partially being sold as a direct continuation of that recent global blockbuster, it’s really more of a sequel to Disney+’s Emmy-winning Marvel series, WandaVision, because it features Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in a direct continuation from what happened in that series.
Although Cumberbatch was recently nominated for his second Oscar for Jane Campion’s Netflix Western, The Power of the Dog, Cumberbatch’s non-Marvel theatrical releases have been a little spotty with movies that have been hit with countless delays and not just due to COVID, as was the case with 2019’s The Current War, which grossed about $6 million. In 2021, his movie The Mauritanian fared about the same globally during the period where movie theaters in New York and L.A. still weren’t open, and a month later, The Courier was back to making $6 million just in North America. In other words, Cumberbatch has not had a great pandemic in theaters, at least until appearing in No Way Home. His biggest non-Marvel movie to date is voicing The Grinch in the Universal animated movie released in 2018, which grossed $270.8 million.
Fortunately, this *IS* a Marvel movie, and Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange has had key roles in both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, two of the other highest grossing movies of all time with $4.8 billion worldwide between them. And then he was in No Way Home, which added another $1.9 billion to that amount, so yeah, Doctor Strange is certainly looking like Marvel’s response to both Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans probably being done with the MCU.
Although Elizabeth Olsen probably hasn’t done that much better since Avengers: Endgame, at least Benedict Wong appeared in last year’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. A big deal about the movie is that the Marvel character America Chavez is being introduced, as played by Xochitl Gomez from The Baby-Sitter’s Club on Netflix.
There’s a lot more “surprises” in Multiverse of Madness, and even though they’ve mostly been out there for a while, I’m not gonna spoil any of them. Not that it will matter, since Marvel fans will be out in force this opening weekend to see the movie as soon as humanly possible. Fandango has stated that tickets have been selling at a rate 5-times that of the original movie but also faster than Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol II, both which opened over $150 million. Because of that, we can safely assume that Multiverse of Madness will also open over $150 million, and despite the COVID asterisk, it’s unlikely to hold the fans back from going to see it.
By the time you read this, reviews will be out for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, including my own, and they’re relatively mixed but mostly positive with 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (at this writing), but going downwards.
Although a few have predicted Multiverse of Madness to open over $200 million this weekend, I think that’s just a bit overly optimistic, not due to COVID so much, as much as due to the relative popularity of Doctor Strange to Spider-Man. Even Ant-Man and the Wasp didn’t get that much of a bump from coming out shortly after Avengers: Infinity War, but only opening $18.6 million higher three years later.
It’s been five and a half years since the previous Doctor Strange movie, which opened with $85 million in November 2016, but a lot has happened since then, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness could see one of the biggest jumps in opening weekend since the $100 million more Avengers: Endgame opened over Infinity War. If that’s taken into consideration, we could see Multiverse of Madness opening slightly north of $180 million, but maybe not quite $200 million.
THE CHART:
With the latest Marvel movie opening this weekend, a lot of the other returning films are going to lose a ton of theaters as smaller theaters with one or two screens drop almost everything, while bigger multiplexes will want to make sure to hold as many screens as possible for the new Doctor Strange movie. Because of this, we can expect a slaughter between first place and the rest of the top 10.
1. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Marvel/Disney) - $187.5 million N/A
2. The Bad Guys (DreamWorks Animation/Universal) - $9 million -45%
3. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Paramount) - $6.2 million -47%
4. Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24) - $4.2 million -25%
5. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (Warner Bros) - $4.3 million -48%
6. The Northman (Focus) - $3 million -52%
7. The Lost City (Paramount) - $2.3 million -40%
8. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Lionsgate) - $2.1 million -46%
9. Memory (Briarcliff) - $1.4 million -55%
10. Father Stu (Sony) - $1 million -55%
HAPPENING (IFC Films)
Opening in New York and L.A. this Friday and in other cities starting May 13 is Audrey Diwan’s period drama based on Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiograpical novel about her problems getting an illegal abortion in ‘60s France. The movie stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne, an ambitious collegiate student who becomes pregnant and attempts to get an illegal abortion while trying to keep on top of her school work and upcoming exams.
I actually saw this when it opened New Directors/New Films a few weeks back, although I didn’t get to cover that as much as I wanted to. Oddly, in just three weeks, the movie has become even more relevant than it was back then with the leaked SCOTUS decision on Roe v Wade from this past week. To be honest, I wasn’t that enamored with the movie when I saw it at ND/NF, maybe because I loved Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake and really liked the recent Never Rarely Sometimes Always (which is playing at the Metrograph next week), and I wasn’t really sure what this movie added to the conversation, especially since it was set in the ‘60s.
Ms. Vartolomei is a fantastic actor and Diwan does a decent job with the material, but I just didn’t find it very interesting when I saw it almost a month ago. Obviously, it’s far more timely now, and I’ll be curious whether I’d feel differently about it if I watched it for the first time now. I’m also curious whether IFC is going to release this into more theaters across the country than they may have originally planned. They did that last week with Hatching, which was also a foreign language film, so maybe they’ll try to do the same with this.
INBETWEEN GIRL (Utopia)
Another coming-of-age drama that’s now available On Demand comes from Mei Makino. It stars Emma Glabraith as Angie Chen, a cynical 16-year-old teen in Galveston, Texas who hooks up with her soccer teammate Liam (William Magnuson), despite him having an influencer girlfriend, Sheryl, who has been saving her virginity for the right time. Things get more complicated when Angie is assigned as Sheryl’s lab partner and has to keep her relationship with Liam a secret.
Although this isn’t the best-made movie, it is a movie with a lot of heart, one that deals well with the confusion of being a teenager and not knowing the difference between being in love and just being horny, which believe it or not, has been consistent throughout the ages. Compared to Happening, I found this a lot easier to relate to (despite being an old guy when I watched both movies), because it’s filled with real emotion and Glabraith does a great job making you care for Angie and her attempts to figure things out. In many ways, this is more on par with Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade than other coming-of-age films from recent memory.
LUX AETERNA (Yellow Veil Pictures)
Gaspar Noé is back. I know, I know, did he really go away? I mean, he just had a movie last week with Vortex! :) His new movie is shorter and much more in the vein of his previous stuff, plus it will debut at New York’s Metrograph, so it will cool to have him on the Lower East Side after his previous film debuted at IFC Center in Greenwich VIllage. This one stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle pretty much as themselves, as they’re making a movie about witches that’s plagued with all sorts of mishaps and technical problems.
Part of me enjoyed this movie, because I like movies about making movies, such as Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy, and the upcoming Official Competition, starring Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas. This one is definitely more in the vein of Noé’s other movies, in terms of being quite edgy and pushing a lot of buttons. This one opens with a quote about epilepsy and ends with a long strobe effect that’s likely to send those with epilepsy into convulsions. Not for a second do I not believe that this was Noé’s intention, so those who are triggered by fast editing or lights may want to avoid this one, especially the last 10 minutes which is like being put into an MRI machine. (If you’ve ever had an MRI, then you know what I’m talking about.)
In between, we watch as actor Charlotte Gainsbourg and director Béatrice Dalle, both playing versions of themselves, try to make a movie about witches. Noé uses a similar split-screen process that he’d carry onto Vortex (still playing in select cities), as we get a bit of a nudge-nudge-wink-wink look at the French film industry, which doesn’t seem that different from Hollywood.
The good thing about Lux is that it’s much shorter than Vortex, under an hour, but the fact that the last 10 minutes is literally these blaring bright lights with similarly loud, blasting noises, makes it hard to fully enjoy what Noé was trying to achieve. While the movie being made within this movie involves witches, the actual movie is not really a genre film, so that’s kind of disappointing. I’m also not sure I’d call it a “madcap comedy” persé, and I actually don’t even think I can fully recommend it. That said, half of me wants to sneak into one of the screenings at the Metrograph this weekend to see a.) how many people remain for the QnA with Noé and b.) what they ask him about that aggravating ending.
ESCAPE THE FIELD (Lionsgate)
Emerson Moore’s thriller is pretty high concept and on-the-nose from the title, as it involves six people who wake up alone in the middle of a vast cornfield, each of them with just one random object, including a woman named Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins), an ER doctor who wakes up next to a gun and a single bullet. She then meets the other five “players” in what seems like it could be a government experiment, as they’re being hunted by some sort of creature.
As with everything else this week, I’m not really writing as much about the movies, but this one is definitely up my alley, being a cross somewhere between Cube, Escape Room, Lost and Saw II, but also the kind of thriller we’ve seen quite a lot of in the past couple decades. Maybe it’s the growing interest in escape rooms that led to Moore writing this, but this ends up being a pretty impressive visual film that does a lot with presumably not a huge budget. (That also makes it more like Cube in that sense.)
Moore has a great cast but I especially liked seeing Theo Rossi as Tyler, because he’s an actor who has really entered my radar since seeing him in Emily the Criminal at Sundance. I also thought Jordan Claire Robbins was quite good as more or less the film’s lead, having not been familiar with her. It’s a bit talkie at times, but otherwise, this is a pretty interesting thriller that, like Escape Room, ends by teasing a potential sequel, and like that movie, I’m definitely interested in where this goes.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (Netflix)
Hitting theaters this Friday and then the Netflix streaming service on Wednesday, May 11, is John Madden’s WWII drama set in 1943 and starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen as British intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Firth) and Charles Chlomondeley (Macfadeny), who saved tens of thousands of lives from a massive invasion by using a disinformation campaign involving a corpse. It also stars Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Jason Isaacs, and more. Madden and Firth will be appearing at a special screening tonight (Thursday) at the Paris Theater in New York City.
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (Cinema Guild)
In case you don’t read the repertory section of this column, you may or may not know that Film at Lincoln Center has been doing an amazingly robust retrospective of Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-So over the past few weeks. They now also have the exclusive on Director Hong’s new movie, which premiered at the New York Film Festival last year. It stars Lee Hye-young as a middle-aged former actress who has returned to South Korean to make amends. The movie follows her over the course of a single day in Seoul where she has a number of encounters with relatives and other acquaintances.
THE TWIN (Shudder)
Hitting theaters, On Demand, Digital and Shudder platforms Friday is this psychological thriller from Finnish filmmakers Taneli Mustonen and Aleksi Hyvärinen, starring Teresa Palmer and Steven Cree. It involves a couple who lose one of their twin sons in a tragic accident, so they relocate to somewhere across the world only to have their surviving son be haunted by mysterious forces.
THE RAVINE (Cinedigm)
Keoni Wazman’s adaptation of Kelly Pascuzzi and Robert Pascuzzi’s book inspired by true events stars Eric Dane, Teri Polo, Peter Facinell, Byron Mann, Leslie Uggams, and Kyle Lowder. A peaceful community is rocked by a crime that makes everyone wonder whether the killer is among them.
ALL MY PUNY SORROWS (Momentum)
Michael McGowan’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel stars Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon as two sisters, the former a struggling writer, the latter a gifted pianist, who wants to end her life, a decision which creates tension between the two. The movie also stars Amybeth Mcnulty, Donal Logue, and Mare Winningham.
Streaming…
THE TAKEDOWN (Netflix)
It’s kind of funny that the week that he gets the gig directing Fast X, filmmaker Louis Letterier (The Incredible Hulk, Clash of the Titans) directs a French action movie that hits the streamer, but this one stars Omar Sy and Laurent Lafitte as police officers Ousmane and François, who have very different styles and backgrounds and who are reunited to investigate a crime spree that takes them across France. I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but I’m always up for a buddy cop comedy, and Letterier has done his fill of cool action movies that I’m curious to see him returning to France.
There are also a couple high-profile series hitting Netflix this week.
THE PENTAVERATE (Netflix)
Hitting the streamer on Thursday is the new series from Mike Myers, who plays eight new characters, as he tells the story of a secret society who have been working to influence world events since 1347. Directed by Tim Kirkby (Last Looks), the six-episode series also stars Ken Jeong, Keegan-Michael Key, Debi Mazar, Richard McCabe, Jennifer Saunders, and Lydia West. Jeremy Irons is the narrator of the series.
MELTDOWN: THREE MILE ISLAND (Netflix)
This four-episode docuseries of 45 minutes each episode, directed by Kief Davidson (The Ivory Game) is now available on Netflix, looking at the near-disaster at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, through the eyes of chief engineer and whistleblower, Richard Parks, as well as the people in the community it impacted.
Also hitting streaming on Thursday is the HBO Max limited series, THE STAIRCASE, based on the Netflix docuseries from a few years back and starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette. Streaming on Hulu starting Monday is CANDY
Repertory stuff….
In conjunction with the theatrical run of Gaspar Noé’s 2019 Lux Æterna (see above), the French auteur has also put together an amazing series of influences for his film, called “All Them Witches.” The series includes Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), as well as more. Also staring this weekend is “Late Night: Hong Kong Goes International” with screenings of Enter the Dragon (1973), Bulletproof Monk (2003), and Ronny Yu’s Bride of Chucky (1998). Also starting this weekend (also quite appropriately and coincidentally) is It Happens to Us, a series about women’s rights being taken away, which includes screenings this weekend of William Wyler’s Detective Story (1951), Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931), Where are My Children? From 1916, and Robert Mulligan’s Love with the Proper Stranger (1963). “Playtime” shifts over to Studio Ghibli for its latest series, beginning with Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind from 1984.
Friday begins a two-week 21-film retrospective of Swedish filmmaker and actress Mai Zetterling, including many new restorations of her films by the Swedish Film Institute. Honestly, I’m not familiar with her work although Loving Couples (1964) and The Girls (1968) are getting the most screenings over the next couple weeks, and Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990) in which Zetterling co-starred with Anjelica Huston will screen as part of Film Forum Jr. this Sunday. On Monday, Film Forum will screen Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André with André Gregory appearing to talk about the movie and sign his new book, “This is Not My Memoir.” The next night, on Tuesday, Gregory will appear with filmmaker Cindy Kleine to talk about her 2013 documentary, Before and After Dinner.
Director John Madden, whose new movie Operation Mincemeat hits the Paris, has selected a few other movies to screen this weekend, including Bonnie and Clyde (1967) on Saturday, and The Double Life of Veronique (1991) on Sunday.
Screening as part of “Waverly Midnights: Staff Picks Winter/Spring 2022” this weekend is Julia Ducornau’s 2016 debut, Raw, picked by “Andrew.”
As mentioned above, the “Hong Sangsoo Multiverse: A Retrospective of Double Features” continues through Tuesday, May 10 (with a secret screening that night), but it will be running one double feature a night with Director Hong on board for some of the screenings.
Starting Weds and running through June 2 is “Forgotten Films of the French New Wave,” which as anyone reading this probably knows, is NOT my forté, so some may have forgotten them. I have no idea they ever existed. Looks like an interesting line-up of movies I have never heard of. Also starting this week at MOMA is “Movies from Earth,” which runs through the end of the month. There are absolutely no movies from Venus, Jupiter or Mars in this series, so for those, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This looks like a mix of fairly recent movies from the past five years. I’ve seen a couple like Manfred Kirchheimer’s Free Time.
This weekend, you can catch the tail-end of “Your Loving Mother: Five by Chantal Akerman,” including screenings of News from Home, Letters Home, and No Home Movie.
Another well-timed series starts this weekend, “In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema, 1959—1992,” although this is not a subject and not a group of films of which I’m particularly familiar with.
ETC…
HUMAN FACTORS (Dark Star Pictures)
MASCARPONE (Dark Star/Uncork’d)
IN A NEW YORK MINUTE (Gravitas Ventures)
SHEPHERD (Saban Films)
Next week… besides Doctor Strange still being #1, Universal release their new version of Stephen King’s Firestarter, and there’s a new Christian comedy called Family Camp.