It’s gross out there, and the prospect of spending a couple of hours in full-blast air conditioning sounds awfully appealing right now, doesn’t it? Just choose carefully.
Brave New Jersey: Jody Lambert’s not-quite-a-farce about the hysteria created by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast falls sadly short of successful, though Mel Rodriguez gets one great laugh.
Brigsby Bear: Saturday Night Live ringer Kyle Mooney plays a damaged soul determined to finish the only story he’s ever cared about in this compellingly odd little picture, about which you should read nothing further if you can help it.
The Dark Tower: Stephen King’s monomythological epic finally comes to the big screen … and boy, do people hate it. Rad’s review should be up later today.
Detroit: Kathryn Bigelow examines the race riots of 1967 as a thriller that’s ambitious as it is uneven. But the Algiers Motel sequence, which comprises the bulk of the film, is phenomenal.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power: Al Gore returns to tell us we’re all probably going to die, and sooner than we’d like, unless we get our shit together and switch to renewable energy. So, hooray?
The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith: You can’t dance to it, but Sara Fishko’s documentary tells a fascinating (and entirely unknown, at least to me) story about the New York music scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
Kidnap: Halle Berry gets all car-chasey in the new thriller from director Luis Prieto, who made that pointless-but-watchable Pusher remake. No press screening, so I’m catching up to it this afternoon.
Landline: Jenny Slate, Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm get the Obvious Child band back together for a softer but still pretty good little dramedy about a splintering Manhattan family, set in 1995 when privacy was still a thing we took for granted.
The Trip to Spain: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and Michael Winterbottom get their band back together for another delightful run of riffing and restauranting — this time seeming to acknowledge they can’t keep doing this forever.
There, that’s everything. Oh, wait, TIFF’s also launching its Ida Lupino series tonight, so I wrote something about that too. I’m a machine.