Hugh Jackman, Chadwick Boseman's Marvel farewell, and CODA are all can't-miss this weekend
Couch it up this fine August weekend and absorb the new trailers for Marvel's Eternals and Apple's Foundation, as well as the new record from Lorde.
We’re ready to have some this weekend. If you are, too, and if your brand of fun is watching the latest and greatest movies and TV shows, playing the hot new games, or even listening to the record all your friends will be talking about in a few months, then you’ll want to check out our weekend guide below, which should get you set up for what to do with all your free time this fine mid-August.
While The White Lotus wrapped up its buzzy run last week and Shang-Chi And The Ten Rings won’t be out for a couple more weeks, there’s still lots of new, at least vaguely interesting stuff to talk about this weekend, from Chadwick Boseman’s final appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Hugh Jackman’s new sci-fi noir Reminiscence. Let’s get started.
The “Let’s go to a theater and see something new” movie to see: Reminiscence
The aforementioned Reminiscence is this weekend’s big new studio release. It’s on HBO Max and in theaters this weekend, but, honestly, the visuals in this movie are one of the more interesting things about it, so if you’re vaccinated and looking to get out of the house and sit in some A/C, you could do worse than this movie. Our critics gave it a B-, which isn’t great, but it’s also not abhorrent?
What our review says:
“In the intriguing, convoluted dystopian noir Reminiscence, the future is not so bright. In fact, it’s so dreary—a damp tomorrow of climate change and post-traumatic stress—that everyone pays for the privilege of escaping into their buried memories of better times. On the outskirts of a perpetually flooded Miami, the lonely and damaged decamp for a dingy warehouse. Here, they slip on an electronic halo, settle into a bed of shallow water, and are lulled into a state of posthypnotic remembrance; they become like the Precogs of Minority Report, except that it’s not premonitions of what’s to come but vivid flashes of what already has that run through their heads and are projected holographically as they slumber, a little show for their hired conjurer of lost experiences. This is, of course, cinema’s latest metaphor for itself. What are the movies but a weaver of collective memory? It’s a connection made clear long before the film trots out an older version of the tech, sending these visions of the past onto a white wall like a flickering projector, in black-and-white no less.” [A.A. Dowd]
The “movie people are talking about” to see: CODA
This year’s big Sundance winner, CODA follows a child of deaf adults as she pursues her musical dreams. It hit theaters and Apple TV+ last weekend and has been steadily building online buzz ever since, with more and more critics and viewers singing its praises and hailing its portrayal of the breadth of the deaf community. It’s currently holding down a 96 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and our own critic gave it a pretty solid B.
What our review says:
“The best and the worst of writer-director Siân Heder’s heartwarming underdog drama CODA are on display in the film’s first 15 minutes. Early on, Heder excessively stacks the deck against her high school heroine, Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones). The popular girls in Ruby’s class look down on her because she dresses unfashionably and she often smells like fish—a byproduct of waking up before dawn to work on her family’s trawler. In their Gloucester, Massachusetts neighborhood, the Rossis have long been figures of curiosity and pity, in part because Ruby’s parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), and her brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), are deaf, and in part because they often behave eccentrically in public, unconcerned with what people think about them.” [Noel Murray]