When the pandemic just started in the US, I spent a few nights watching a few Taika Waititi movies that I had never seen before: Hunting the Wilderpeople en What we do in the shadows. They were the perfect kind of light films without stress for the moment.
That’s really the kind of experience that Waititi makes in making it. His films are full of silly, try-hard characters that you can not help but care about, but he never really brings them down in the way of evil. They blow their way constantly through a playful scenario of making their own, and it is usually clear how they can find their way out. This lowers the stakes, but leaves room for the great personalities of the characters to shine through.
Check out this week’s nine trailers (and last week’s I Was Away!) Below.
Kajillionaire
Nearly a decade after her last film, Miranda July is back with a wild twist on a heist film – a film about a bizarre family of con-artists and the daughter (played by Evan Rachel Wood) who suddenly began to realize that she was more of have people. It comes out (in theaters, presumably) on September 18th.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield die in this film about Fred Hampton, the leader of the Black Panther Party in Illinois who was murdered by police in 1969. This trailer makes the film seem to have the energy of an action- thriller. It will come out next year sometimes.
I’m thinking of ending things
Charlie Kaufman’s next film is a time-consuming thriller about a woman who goes to her boyfriend’s parents during a snowstorm and seems to end up slipping through the past of those around her. The film is an adaptation of a novel by Iain Reid, but it clearly reflects the kind of confusing voyages of discovery that Kaufman (who wrote Eternal sunshine) is often interested in diving into. The film will be released on September 4th.
Zola
I love this simple and serious first look Zola, the movie based on the viral Twitter thread (yes, it’s based on a Twitter thread!) about two strippers on a road trip that went wildly wrong. My colleague Adi Roberston called the film ‘beautiful and captivating’ when she debuted at Sundance. There is no specific date for when it will come out.
Raised by Wolves
Ridley Scott is working on a sci-fi series for HBO Max, and it looks like an early mashup of farthest tech and fantasy ideas. The show is about androids dedicated to raising human children on a new planet, where things are inevitably going wrong. The show debuts on September 3rd.
Small Axis
Steve McQueen, CEO of 12 years a slave, working on a miniature anthology of stories from the West Indies community of London between the 1960s and 1980s. This is a look at just one of five films directed at a group of Black activists arrested for protesting police management in 1970. The series is set to hit Amazon and BBC One this autumn.
Railed
Ryan Murphy’s latest Netflix series is a prequel of sorts One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, focused on Nurse Ratchet. Sarah Paulson dies as a quiet, seemingly ready to snap Nurse Ratch who works in a technicolor hospital. It comes out on September 18th.
The vow
HBO has a documentary series about NXIVM, the self-help group that claims to be an abusive cult and pyramid scheme. The series comes from the filmmakers behind The square. It debuts on August 23rd
We are who we are
Here’s the first real look at Luca Guadagnino’s new HBO series, the director of Call me by your name. It’s about two American teenagers growing up in Italy, and it seems to have a lot of sunshine and sexual inconvenience, which is kind of all you want from a Guadagnino show. It debuts on September 14th.
