As folks dust off their air conditioners for another hot summer, The Playlist and moviegoers alike are preparing for another kind of scorching hot intensity, the Hollywood hype machine. While we’re busy critiquing the films and analyzing the box office, we hope you good folks are able to enjoy some good nights out at the movies. But as ever, there’s an unwieldy minefield of choices that reach into and well beyond your local multiplex. Take a wrong step, and you may just end up hitting a bomb. But that’s why we’re here.
On the other end of the cinema spectrum from blockbuster season, off to a solid start already with the usual animated kiddie fare and comic book spectacles drawing crowds (pity for the R-rated comedies though), there’s the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival, which we covered aplenty. It’s a great reminder this time of year that not all films are created equal, but the smaller, more challenging and potentially artistic-driven works still need plenty of media attention and pop cultural currency. Which brings me to this column’s Film Of The Month, “Right Now, Wrong Then.” This latest from South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo is a charming little gem you may not have heard of but will probably enjoy. Find out why and what other films are worth your time this month below…
“The Wailing”
Synopsis: A lawman recruits a shaman to help him find a vicious murderer who’s terrorizing a peaceful village.
What You Need To Know: Director Na Hong-jin is the other underrated (or lesser known) South Korean filmmaker who makes this month’s final list. And for good reason, as his last two neo-noir crime works “The Chaser” and “The Yellow Sea” are themselves worth catching up on (especially if you like the country’s other, more celebrated and subversive genre mashups). But also, in an uncommonly quick festival-premiere-to-U.S.-release turnaround, his latest work, “The Wailing,” had us singing his praises as much as his recognized countrymen: “At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, internationally renowned Korean auteur Park Chan-wook dished out ‘The Handmaiden‘, slicing critical opinion down the middle, but in a darker, slightly seedier, much more fantastically and no-holds-barred entertaining way, a younger Korean director showed his splendid colors too… the film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.” If you’re lucky enough to find this in an arthouse, see it fast.
Release Date: June 3rd
“Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”
Synopsis: When it becomes clear that his solo album is a failure, a former boy band member does everything in his power to maintain his celebrity status.
What You Need To Know: It would seem the trio of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone — aka The Lonely Island — are the perfect filmmakers to skewer the world of pop music. And hopes are high here for the Lonely Island dudes, who’ve perfected that very schtick after years on ‘SNL’, to make a proper splash in theaters (Schaffer’s “The Watch” fared dismally, Taccone’s “MacGruber” flopped and only recently found its culty niche, while Samberg’s only ever really connected as a TV star). Samberg leads the movie playing Conner4Real, a not so thinly veiled Justin Bieber type who’s a massive star, but has no self-awareness of his own pretensions, with nothing between his ears but vapid soundbites. Props to the massive supporting cast including Sarah Silverman, Imogen Poots, Bill Hader, Joanna Newsom, Maya Rudolph, Will Arnett and many, many more. We hope the idea plays as well on the screen as it does on paper.
Release Date: June 3rd
“De Palma”
Synopsis: A documentary about filmmaker Brian De Palma.
What You Need To Know: When we reviewed this doc from De Palma fanboys Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow at Venice last year, we noted that, formally, it’s nothing special. But who needs technical bravado or boundary pushing style when you’ve got one of the major figures from Hollywood’s glorious 1970s period gabbing about his work? As our own Jessica Kiang puts it, “the legendary director talks non-stop, with one anecdote jump-cut against the next so fast that often the breaths in between sentences are snipped out… And then, maybe four minutes in, you realize it’s because he has so damn much to say and all of it is utterly delicious — in the time saved by removing those pesky inhalations, we probably get six or seven more pithy observations stuffed into this breakneck movie.” And because Kiang is way too fun to quote, there’s this must-share, heavenly last line of her review, describing the film as “a hit of garrulous cinephile cocaine so pure you want to do a Tony Montana, fall face-first into it and inhale it all in one go.” If you can resist seeing this film after reading that, check your pulse. You may have flatlined.
Release Date: June 10th (Limited)
“The Conjuring 2”
Synopsis: Lorraine and Ed Warren travel to north London to help a single mother raising four children alone in a house plagued by malicious spirits.
What You Need To Know: It’s tempting to describe “The Conjuring” as a “surprise horror hit” but by this stage there should be nothing surprising about a James Wan movie doing good box office and spawning a franchise: he did it with “Saw,” then with “Insidious” and then turned in the hugely successful “Furious 7.” Of course, it feels less likely that “The Conjuring,” the comparatively low-key “classy” ghost-story horror that sets itself apart from the schlocky pleasures of most films in the genre with the quality of its moody photography and relative investment in character, should also get the sequel treatment. But when even the substandard spin-off/prequel “Annabelle” (which Wan did not direct) made a 40-fold box office return on investment, a sequel was inevitable, and, even more unusually, actually brings a fairly enticing prospect with the same stars and filmmaker returning.
Release Date: June 10th
“Warcraft”
Synopsis: The peaceful realm of Azeroth stands on the brink of war as its civilization faces a fearsome race of invaders: orc warriors fleeing their dying home to colonize another. From opposing sides, two heroes are set on a collision course that will decide the fate of their family, their people, and their home.
What You Need To Know: Duncan Jones is just the latest in an ever-lengthening line of directors making a Springfield Gorge-sized leap to studio franchise filmmaking after only a few modestly budgeted films under their belts. (Jones’ first two features, “Moon” and “Source Code,” we’re well-reviewed and did relatively strong box office.) But with his adaptation of Blizzard Entertainment‘s sprawling video game fantasy, which our critic Russ Fischer recently reviewed, I’m sure he’s hoping for the kind of box office that welcomed Colin Trevorrow and not so much Josh Trank. Russ’s review described the spectacle and special effects work by Industrial Light & Magic as brilliant, even if “the high fantasy fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien still retains a tight hold on most sword-and-sorcery imaginations. ‘Warcraft’ may be a loose adaptation of video games with sci-fi leanings, which theoretically should break it out of the mold, but its collision of men and orcs, with a few dwarves and elves in the mix, ultimately feels like yet another disciple of Tolkien’s fantasy commandments.”
Release Date: June 10th