Hello there, and welcome to this week’s Film Roundup – taking you through the week’s newest cinema releases to help you decide what particular visual delights deserve your cash and attention. This week we have a colourful space adventure, a cornered killer, a love triangle, a couple of births, and a death parrot…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these films. All of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Borderlands
Based on the videogame, Borderlands tells the story of a group of misfit adventurers trying to rescue a missing girl on one of the most chaotic planets in the universe (which also happens to reportedly be home to a vault full of untold treasures). The aesthetic feels like a more psychedelic version of the recent Fallout TV adaptation with a bit of Mad Max thrown in, but the desert planet of Pandora and its population of bandits and monsters should look pretty familiar to fans. The general vibe in the trailer, from the ragtag gang of heroic outcasts, the blend of humour and action, and the ELO needle drop, is very Guardians of the Galaxy (Arianna Greenblatt might as well be cosplaying Rocket Raccoon). Which might not make it the most original piece of cinema, but if you’re going to rip off a franchise then there are far worse templates that you could use.
Like Guardians, this also has an impressively stacked cast. The group is led by Cate Blanchett’s bounty hunter Lilith, who is joined by Kevin Hart’s mercenary Roland, Arianna Greenblatt’s explosion-loving Tiny Tina and her hulking protector Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Jamie Lee Curtis’s scientist Tannis, and a robot named Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black). Blanchett is always great and should bring a little gravitas to what might otherwise be a pretty daft movie, and Jack Black seems a good fit with the tone this is going for.
If the film can live up to the trailer then this should be a lot of fun, and a perfect school holidays blockbuster to entertain older children as well as any adults with nostalgia for the games. Unfortunately the early reviews have not been great – at the time of writing it has a spectacularly low 3% on Rotten Tomatoes (I’d expect it to go up a little once the film comes out properly but that’s still not a great sign…).
- Borderlands on IMDB
- Borderlands on Rotten Tomatoes
Trap
If you’ve been to see any horror films at the cinema recently, you might have watched the trailers and wondered if you were in the right screen, or if you had in fact wandered into a re-run of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. Because there are two films coming out soon that focus on pop concerts where things go very, very wrong. The first of these, before creepy sequel Smile 2, is Trap – the latest from M Night Shyamalan.
Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter Riley to see her idol Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) live in concert, but is concerned when he sees police surrounding the venue. He manages to learn from one of the merchandise vendors that the whole concert has been set up as a trap for the Butcher – a renowned serial killer who brutally tortures his victims and who the police had learned was going to be at the gig. Like all M Night Shyamalan films, this has a twist, but unlike most of them this one reveals its twist up-front in the trailer – unbeknownst to his daughter, Cooper is the Butcher. Can he escape without getting caught and without arousing Riley’s suspicions?
This is an intriguing premise. Like the recent In A Violent Nature, it’s a horror told from the killer’s perspective, although unlike that film it looks as though he has more to do than clomp around and kill people. The fun of it is going to be seeing the inventive ways he tries to slip past his would-be captors. Hartnett – who is having a bit of a comeback after appearances in Black Mirror, Oppenheimer and The Bear – is well cast, with enough charisma and cool to believe that he can get away with murder. The difficulty is going to be knowing how far we should be rooting for someone who is clearly the villain of the piece. Most films that follow an antihero give them enough redeeming features to compensate for their sins, but it looks as though the Butcher is a real psychopath and I don’t think ‘being a dad’ is going to cut it. If Shyamalan instead plays this so that we’re not meant to root for him, that could make for quite a dark and unusual cinema experience.
However it plays out, this should be an entertaining thriller.
- Trap on IMDB
- Trap on Rotten Tomatoes
It Ends With Us
Based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us follows Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) as she starts a new life opening a flower shop in Boston. There, she meets Ryle (Justin Baldoni) and quickly falls in love, but as their relationship blossoms he starts to reveal his darker side, bringing back traumatic memories of her abusive parents. Just then, her childhood sweetheart Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) comes back into her life, leaving her with a difficult choice – should she be with the secretly violent guy she just met, or the nice guy who supported her through a difficult time of her life? (I assume there’s more nuance to it than that…)
I think it’s safe to say that I’m not this film’s target audience. I’m not a huge fan of romance films and I know nothing at all about the book that it’s based on. But it looks very nicely shot, Blake Lively is a dependable actress, and the supporting cast includes Jenny Slate, Kevin McKidd and Hasan Minhaj, all of whom I have a lot of time for. If you are a fan of the book, or romance films in general, then this should be right up your street.
- It Ends With Us on IMDB
- It Ends With Us on Rotten Tomatoes
Tuesday
From A24 (increasingly a sign of quality at the cinema) comes Tuesday, in which a mother (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her terminally ill daughter (Lola Petticrew) are confronted by Death in the form of a creepy, gravelly-voiced talking parrot. The parrot helps them come to terms with their impending goodbye before he helps the daughter shuffle off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and join the choir invisible.
I haven’t heard much about this film, but judging by the trailer it looks pretty beautiful. The CGI on the parrot is a little shonky in places but that just makes him look more creepy and dreamlike. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (getting one last indie in before Marvel’s Thunderbolts) is inevitably going to give a great performance, but the less well-known Petticrew looks fantastic as well. I have high hopes for this and I definitely think it’s going to be worth trying to catch when it comes out.
- Tuesday on IMDB
- Tuesday on Rotten Tomatoes
Babes
In this comedy, two lifelong friends Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) find their relationship tested when Eden decides to pursue a pregnancy following a one-night stand. This is very much targeted at a female audience, with the plot and jokes built around pregnancy, motherhood, and female friendships. Not all of the jokes in the trailer land for me – not just because I’m not the target audience, but also because some of the humour feels very American – but there are a few that made me chuckle. The twin STI testers second-guessing themselves into celebrating Eden as “single” is particularly nicely written. The supporting cast includes Oliver Platt and (for the second time in this Film Roundup) Hasan Minhaj. This has been well-reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes, and successful female-led comedies are still relatively rare, so this should be well worth catching if it appeals to you.
- Babes on IMDB
- Babes on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
Tricky one this week, but for originality and emotional heft I think my recommendation is Tuesday.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- Deadpool & Wolverine
- Twisters
- Longlegs
Trailer of the week
A trailer has just dropped today for Jason Reitman’s upcoming Saturday Night, which charts the chaotic build-up to the first episode of American comedy staple Saturday Night Live. It’s a great cast, including Finn Wolfhard, JK Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Braun and Dylan O’Brien, playing a great cast including the likes of Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and Jim Henson. This looks like great fun.
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