Death On The Nile, Jackass in theaters, and some love triangles are coming this February

Love is all around us next month—at least as far as movies are concerned. Valentine’s Day and the weeks surrounding it bring a variety of romances to the big and small screen, beginning with one of the best movies of last year, belatedly bidding for hearts everywhere in wider release. Otherwise, the month offers plenty of would-be blockbusters, including a Roland Emmerich space disaster, a belatedly released video game adaptation, and a somewhat starry murder mystery on a boat. Still not ready to hit the multiplex again? Netflix has you covered with a rom-com sequel, a Kanye West documentary, and the debatably necessary return of Leatherface. Keep reading to find out everything that’s coming to theaters and a living room near you this February.

It’s been more than a decade since the last big-screen outing for the Jackass boys, and Paramount is taking no risks that we’ll somehow miss the comeback party: The trailer for this fourth installment of Johnny Knoxville’s group therapy seemed to play in front of almost every multiplex release between July and November of 2021, as the studio finally settled on—and loudly announced—a date for fans to gather en masse, then laugh and scream again. Hopefully Omicron will be receding enough by early February to make that an easy decision, and not a Jackass-style stunt.

While the big studios have excused themselves from the Roland Emmerich world-destroying business, his apocalypses can apparently carry on indefinitely without them. The director’s latest is a sci-fi disaster movie about the moon getting knocked out of orbit and heading for a collision course with Earth, featuring dubious alternate history. The characters are astronauts (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) and a conspiracy theorist (K.C. Houseman) who turns out to be right. Presumably, a dog or perhaps a large housecat will triumphantly jump out of the way of a fireball’s path at the last minute.

A.V. Club favorite Joachim Trier completes his Oslo trilogy—see previous stunners and —with this digressive, conceptually energetic drama about a thirtysomething (Renate Reinsve) torn between her longtime beau and a new infatuation. Trier makes stylish, novelistically digressive portraits of restless youth, and he seems poised to finally earn the ardent fanbase his work deserves with The Worst Person In The World, which landed on our list of the . (It’s expanding into more theaters now after a very quiet awards run last autumn.)

Steven Soderbergh’s latest for HBO Max comes, characteristically, less than a year after his last one, the excellent. He appears to be in mode while possibly rejiggering for an even more digital era with this story of a techie shut-in (Zoë Kravitz) who discovers evidence of a murder and must leave the house in order to report and/or solve the crime–during the pandemic, no less! There are few filmmakers better-suited to maneuver around that last potential stumbling block than the resourceful, fast-moving, socially conscious Soderbergh. And if he doesn’t pull it off, hey, he’ll probably have another movie ready before the year is out.

Kenneth Branagh scored an unlikely smash with his extravagant adaptation of the Agatha Christie locked room (make that locked compartment) mystery . So why does the inevitable sequel still feel like something of a gamble? Perhaps because, thanks to the pandemic, it’s been five years since Murder hit theaters. Or maybe it’s that the sprawling cast is lower wattage, with Gal Gadot the only major movie star in an ensemble that—unfortunately for the publicity team—also includes Armie Hammer and Letitia Wright. Will any of that kill this budding franchise of old-fashioned whodunits? Or will Branagh, returning to direct and reprise his leading role as master detective Hercule Poirot, again crack the case of the old-school, adult-targeted hit, even without a Imagine Dragons song in the trailer?

It was a cold January without any Liam Neeson vehicles to warm our action-loving hearts. Thankfully, the star hasn’t, ahem, taken the whole winter off; his annual care package of AARP ass-kicking is just arriving during a different Hollywood dump month. Reuniting with director Mark Williams, Neeson this time plays a black-ops fixer who decides to remove himself from the government’s payroll once he discovers that the FBI has (newsflash!) been targeting Americans. In other words, it sounds like another glorified B-movie with a political conscience—business as usual for the aging Irish-brogued bruiser with a particular set of skills.

The return of gritty, crime-movie Jennifer Lopez with all but assured that we would also witness the rebirth of rom-com J-Lo, pop-star J-Lo, and middle-age-dynamo J-Lo. All three of those personas appear present and accounted for in Marry Me, an unlikely rom-com where a massive pop star (guess who) decides to marry a stranger (Owen Wilson) from the audience of her concert, after a splashy on-stage wedding to a fellow singer falls through. Will this mismatched couple actually make it work? Well, this Valentine’s Day-timed movie isn’t called Acrimoniously Divorce Me.

Another love triangle for the holiday. This one’s an adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s YA bestseller about a bereaved teenage musician (Grace Kaufman) who finds her broken heart drawn to both a sensitive classmate and her deceased older sister’s fiancé. What makes The Sky Is Everywhere intriguing is the director handling its tearjerker material: Josephine Decker, whose last movie, , was a pitilessly caustic fictionalization of Shirley Jackson’s life and marriage. Needless to say, this looks like a change of pace, albeit one that’s provided Decker a chance to revel in some nifty fantasy flourishes.

Did you enjoy ? The almighty Netflix algorithm has the data to prove that you did, and it’s back to recommend another comedy about puny humans fighting back against their plainly superior robotic help. Bigbug isn’t an animated movie, but French fabulist Jean-Pierre Jeunet—he of the whimsical , and also a bunch of much less whimsical science-fiction movies—has given it the bright, gaudy, colorful aesthetic of a live-action cartoon. Like most visions of the future, this one will eventually fascinate as a snapshot of the past; that it seems to take place entirely within a single besieged suburban home should help the carbon dating super-intelligent machines of tomorrow pinpoint when it was shot.

Last year, Netflix put the lid on two hit franchises, wrapping up the All The Boys and Kissing Booth trilogies. To fill the content void, the streaming platform is now sequelizing another of its recent rom-com sensations with this follow-up to the 2019 teen movie about a towering wallflower (Ava Michelle) who feels self-conscious because she’s lanky. Part two appears to engineer some fresh romantic conflict for the titular Tall Girl, now a social butterfly struggling to balance her old relationships with her newfound popularity. “Tall Girl is seemingly designed to be viewed with the same casualness with which people binge-watch their favorite sitcoms,” we wrote in our . That’s not a very high bar, har har, for the sequel to clear.

This rom-com with actual comedy stars looks a bit like crossed with Strangers On A Train: A pair of recently dumped emotional messes (Jenny Slate and Charlie Day) lean on each other for support—and then for zany-scheme generation when they decide to sabotage each other’s exes. Slate’s ex is played by Scott Eastwood, Day’s by Gina Rodriguez, and Jason Orley directs, hopefully bringing some of the unexpected charm of his previous movie,.

Boxer Kali Reis joins the ranks of real-life fighters bringing their athletic skills to the big screen with this hard-hitting thriller she co-wrote with director Josef Kubota Wladyka. Reis plays an Indigenous boxer not unlike herself (they share the same nickname, “K.O.”) who goes undercover to track down the sex traffickers who have abducted her sister. The movie is modest in scale, more grim revenge procedural than all-out action movie, but Reis’s steely presence lends it some additional weight.

Miss the old Kanye? The straight from the ‘Go Kanye? The chop up the soul Kanye? There’s a whole lot of that Kanye in this four-and-a-half hour documentary, which co-director Clarence “Coodie” Simmons began shooting when the Chicago rapper was a rising hip-hop producer in his early 20s. Divided into three distinct chapters, jeen-yuhs follows West around as he hustles for a record deal and lays down , then catches up with him years later, during his recent tumble into Christian music and politics. This baggy -inspired epic, which premiered in part at Sundance a few days ago, suffers from some serious gaps in its timeline.

Tom Holland, star of the right now, swings into the role of another agile adventurer: Nathan Drake, the cocksure fortune-hunter hero of Naughty Dog’s hit video game franchise. Uncharted has been in some form of development for so long that Mark Wahlberg, who plays Drake’s mentor Sully, was once in consideration for the lead role. This repeatedly delayed version from director Ruben Fleischer has been billed as a prequel to the games, a kind of take on their globe-trotting, artifact-seeking derring do. Let’s hope it’s better than that last , which adapted another video game heavily indebted to the Indiana Jones movies into… an unmemorable Indiana Jones imitation.

The grows even more convoluted with this latest installment, which is supposedly a direct sequel to the … you know, just like a decade ago. Possibly chasing that money, the film picks up decades later with an elderly Leatherface getting back into the butcher business when a bunch of young businessmen (blatant subtext alert!) interrupt his retirement. Will the old brute be as rusty as the saw he put down in the ’70s? If there’s any reason to be excited about this umpteenth return to the slaughterhouse, it’s the “story by” credit for Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, whose was better than most Hollywood horror reboots.

It’s oddly comforting that no matter the uncertain state of the industry, they’ll just keep making plainly titled movies for dog lovers. Channing Tatum gets in on the canine canon by both starring and co-directing this comedy about a U.S. Army Ranger who agrees to drive a seemingly aggressive service dog from Washington to Arizona to attend the funeral of her decorated military handler. It’s been a full five years since Tatum headlined a movie, and if this isn’t the triumphant return to the spotlight fans might want, the trailer suggests that he’s still more than capable of holding up his end of a classic comedy dynamic, even against a scene partner with a rather limited vocabulary.

Screenwriter Graham Moore’s first feature won him an Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which must be why he gets to follow up with such an odd-looking feature directorial debut. The Outfit is apparently a pun-based crime drama, following a tailor (Mark Rylance) who makes beautiful clothes, primarily at the service of Chicago gangsters. With some manner of assistant (Zoey Deutch) at his side, a particularly eventful night has him enduring various evidence-hiding, mob-doctoring, and blood-scrubbing scenarios. The intriguing bit is the pairing of Rylance and Deutch, an onscreen team-up no one especially anticipated.

Exquisite period costumes, tony manor homes, upstairs/downstairs romance, the private suffering of the aristocracy—all classic elements of British period pieces. Mothering Sunday approaches the genre from the perspective of Jane (Odessa Young), a housemaid in 1920s England whose forbidden affair with the upper-crust Paul (Josh O’Connor) sets her on her ultimate path as an acclaimed writer. (Paul is doomed to an arranged marriage and a career as a barrister, the poor thing.) Multiple cast members from The Crown, including Olivia Colman in a performance that earned raves at Telluride, further shore up the posh credentials of this drama from director Eva Husson (), which seems to combine stiff-upper-lip manners and unbridled passion.