I can recommend Booksmart for fun and smarts and Rocketman for fun. This weekend, there is a wave of movies that I haven’t seen yet, both critically praised (The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Late Night) and popcorn movies (Men In Black: International, Shaft).
OUT NOW
- The wildly successful comedy Booksmart is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen. Directed and written by women, BTW.
- The Fall of the American Empire is a pointed satire cleverly embedded in the form of a heist film.
- Rocketman is more of a jukebox musical than a filmbiography, but it’s wonderfully entertaining.
- So you think you know what you’re going to get from a movie titled Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. It is indeed a documentary of a concert tour, but Scorsese adds some fictional flourish, as befits Dylan’s longtime trickster persona.
- Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen are pleasantly entertaining in the improbable Beauty-and-the-Beast romantic comedy Long Shot.
- The documentary Framing John DeLorean is an incomplete retelling of this modern Icarus fable. If you already know the basics of the DeLorean story, I’d recommend this Car and Driver article instead. Framing John DeLorean is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON VIDEO
My DVD/Stream of the Week is Bay Area writer-director Ryan Coogler’s emotionally powerful debut, Fruitvale Station. Coogler, of course, has become one of the top American filmmakers with Creed and Black Panther (both also with Michael B. Jordan). Fruitvale Station is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
ON TV
On June 20, Turner Classic Movies presents David Lean’s WWII epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s the stirring story of British troops forced into slave labor at a cruel Japanese POW camp. The British commander (Alec Guinness, in perhaps his most acclaimed performance) must walk the tightrope between giving his men enough morale to survive and helping the enemy’s war effort. He has his match in the prison camp commander (Sessue Hayakawa), and these two men from conflicting values systems engage in a duel of wits – for life and death stakes. William Holden plays an American soldier/scoundrel forced into an assignment that he really, really doesn’t want. There’s also the stirringly unforgettable whistling version of the Colonel Bogey March. The climax remains one of the greatest hold-your-breath action sequences in cinema, even compared to all the CGI-aided ones in the 62 years since it was filmed.
