If parties and picnics and festivals for Fourth of July aren’t your thing, there are plenty of alternate locations to explore from the comfort of a movie theater this weekend, from Giant Country in The BFG to the isolated island that serves as the setting for Swiss Army Man. (Pretending you’re not in the U! S! A! for a few hours can be oddly relieving, if a little creepy.) You can find even more choices via our complete movie times listings, including the generally boring Legend of Tarzan, the disconnected yet beautiful Neon Demon, and Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey as an unrelenting and annoying “badass white savior.”
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NEW RELEASES
1. The BFG
The BFG is an oddly paced but eventually rewarding film, with one or two flat-out magnificent stretches. You probably remember Dahl’s book as being bubbly and bright, but the English author’s humor and fluidity with language disguised a dark tale of Dickensian sorrow and Greek-god violence. Sophie is an orphan, a completely isolated (and tiny) figure in a decidedly inhospitable world. When she, in the dead of night, spies the 24-foot-tall BFG—which stands for Big Friendly Giant, although she doesn’t know about the “Friendly” part just yet—outside her orphanage window, he abducts her and squirrels her away in his secret cave in Giant Country. NED LANNAMANN
Wide Release
2. Our Kind of Traitor
Ewan MacGregor and Naomie Harris are a bit too glamorous to convincingly play a poetics professor and his lawyer wife, but Stellan Skarsgård is great as a Russian gangster who befriends them on their vacation in an attempt to go clean. The camerawork, saturated in unnatural blues and golds, is distracting and diffused, but John le Carré’s source book makes for a ripping great story, in which international intrigue is shot through with a surprising amount of heart. NED LANNAMANN
Wide Release
3. Swiss Army Man
If you want your dreams to be weird for the rest of your life, see Swiss Army Man, directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano. Radcliffe, working hard to quash your beloved associations of Harry Potter, portrays a farting corpse—a farting corpse that serves as a companion, prop, and man Friday to Dano’s very sad young bearded man, Hank. Hank is just like most sad young bearded men, except he’s also a castaway on an island, where his creepy new pal washes ashore. MEGAN BURBANK
Wide Release
LIMITED RUNS
4. Belladonna of Sadness
In 1973, the United States wasn’t quite ready for Belladonna of Sadness, Eiichi Yamamoto’s erotic animated adaptation of French historian Jules Michelet’s 1862 tome La Sorcière. Though there’s movement, which builds to a stroboscopic crescendo toward the end, Yamamoto relies largely on static, richly-hued watercolors and oil paintings to tell the story of Jeanne (voiced by Aiko Nagayama), a beautiful weaver in a feudal village where poverty and marriage don’t mix (at times, the art recalls Mœbius’s storyboards for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune adaptation). Making its US debut, this beautifully restored version combines the sexually-charged atmosphere of 1974’s soft-core fantasia Emmanuelle with the anything-goes spirit of 1977’s horror whatsit House. KATHY FENNESSY (Thursday only)
Grand Illusion
5. De Palma
The filmmakers, who are also filmmakers, don’t really press their subject very hard, and it’s easy to see why. Contrary to his devilish behind-the-camera reputation, De Palma on-screen comes across as a gregarious, often hilarious narrator of his own career. His laugh is warm and infectious, and his gift for showbiz anecdotes is world-class. Hearing him trash-talk Cliff Robertson, or describe how Al Pacino bailed on an overlong shoot, or the little ways Sean Penn psyched out Michael J. Fox honestly made me wish the doc was five hours long. SEAN NELSON (Thursday only)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
6. Labyrinth
David Bowie’s goofy, trippy 1986 adventure/fantasy film about getting what you wish for. (All weekend)
Central Cinema
7. Tickled
The title suggests a film about a harmless fetish, but this chilling documentary uncovers more emotional pain than physical pleasure. In the prologue, a television reporter describes David Farrier as “New Zealand’s favorite pop culture reporter.” One day, he comes across a call for a competitive endurance tickling contest that involves flights to Los Angeles and four-day hotel stays. On the evidence of the video clips, the scene is rather wholesomely homoerotic (the male participants remain fully clothed during sessions). KATHY FENNESSY (All weekend)
Guild 45th
WIDE RELEASES
8. Captain America: Civil War
If you want to get super technical about it, Captain America: Civil War isn’t so much a Captain America movie as the third flick in the Avengers series. While Cap may be the heart and soul of this film, Marvel made sure to cram in as many of their products as humanly possible. But what should’ve been a 2.5-hour mess is another seemingly inconceivable Marvel miracle. Frenetic action set pieces are plopped in at regular intervals, and the uniformly terrific cast makes the long running time more than bearable. It’s way better than the marginally enjoyable Age of Ultron, and packs more fun than Winter Soldier, while still maintaining that film’s dark, paranoid edge. At this point, we know Marvel’s got an expansive, ongoing game plan, and this movie is just another piece in their puzzle. That’s why I’ve decided to trust and not start a war about it (civil or otherwise). WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
9. The Conjuring 2
For horror fans accustomed to wandering through acres of dreck for a meager jolt, James Wan is the real deal. The Conjuring 2, the director’s return to the horror game after the amiably knuckle headed Furious 7, is a brilliantly staged, strangely exhausting work of a filmmaker in complete thrall to his chosen genre. This is a movie where virtually every scene is designed expressly for the purpose of causing the viewer’s colon to have an out-of-body experience. ANDREW WRIGHT
10. Finding Dory
I never thought a movie about animated fish would make me cry so much. But then again, not all fish are Dory, the charming protagonist of Finding Dory, Pixar’s sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo. Although the movie is intended to be a follow-up, Finding Dory holds its own 13 years after its predecessor debuted and anchored itself in the hearts of then-10-year-olds like me. As an adult, I discovered a new appreciation for the characters of my favorite Pixar film. ANA SOFIA KNAUF
11. Independence Day: Resurgence
A sequel to 1996 science fiction thriller Independence Day, this new edition of “massive alien attack” features stars including Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman reprising their original roles, as well as new faces from Liam Hemsworth to Maika Monroe.
12. The Lobster
Here’s the thing about The Lobster, the thing that’ll either make you want to see it or never see it: It captures what it feels like to be single. And not just that—it captures what it feels like to be single in a society obsessed with everyone having someone. That’s not a particularly fun thing to address, but it’s not particularly awful, either, so The Lobster splits the difference: surreal and heartfelt, it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and eerily melancholy. One minute, characters are wondering if they’ll ever find a partner; the next, they’re deciding which animal they’ll turn into if they end up single. ERIK HENRIKSEN
13. Love & Friendship
Who better than Whit Stillman, who has been flirting with Jane Austen since that brilliant exchange about Mansfield Park in his exquisite debut, Metropolitan, to adapt and extrapolate a story Austen wrote in her teens? SEAN NELSON
14. Maggie’s Plan
The screwball comedy Maggie’s Plan is filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s most satisfying film to date. Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, a college arts adviser, who has had lousy luck with men, but longs to have a baby. So she comes up with a plan—it involves underwear-model-turned-actor Travis Fimmel—but fate intervenes when she falls for Ethan Hawke’s unhappily married anthropology professor, John. Miller loves these characters, including Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader as Maggie’s unfiltered friends, too much to paint any of them as villains, and if Maggie’s plans—there are three altogether—are complicated by the vagaries of human desire, her happy ending feels fully earned. KATHY FENNESSY
15. The Nice Guys
Sure, the mystery is fun, and yeah, it’s a goddamn delight to see Healy and March shoot and stumble their way though LA. But unlike just about every other modern American comedy, The Nice Guys is an honest-to-god actual big-screen comedy—with Black taking advantage of cuts, camera moves, sight gags, and framing to deliver both action thrills and unpredictable laughs. Most American comedies—which, with their static setups and half-improvised dialogue, might as well be performed as plays—can’t be bothered with any of the cinematic cleverness Black giddily employs here. ERIK HENRIKSEN
16. The Shallows
Even at its most overt, The Shallows shows just how bracing and propulsive a good B-movie can be, especially in the hands of a director who knows exactly when to linger on a shot of the indecently beautiful scenery, and when to dip the camera below the waterline for maximum unease. It’s pulp, but artful pulp. ANDREW WRIGHT
17. Weiner
As everyone knows, sexts brought Anthony Weiner’s brilliant political career to an end not once but twice. The first time, in 2011, was not fatal; the second time, in 2013, was. The first time cost him his seat in Congress (where he made fiery speeches and attacked the GOP like a bulldog)—the second, his chance of becoming the mayor of New York City. The documentary is about his second and final fall…But the real star of this very entertaining documentary is Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin. Her face, her body, her movements are a ship that crosses the crises of her marriage with admirable steadiness. Her husband has only a poor idea of her greatness. Hillary Clinton, however, knows the real value of this woman, which is why she is keeping Abedin close to her as she runs for president. In the documentary, we watch Abedin dump her husband’s political career for Hillary’s. CHARLES MUDEDE
