A few weeks ago, I watched God Help the Girl, the 2014 musical by Belle and Sebastian bandleader Stuart Murdoch. The film doesn’t have particularly great reviews, but it’s something I’d been meaning to watch for a while. I’d listened to the album it’s based on years before the movie came out, and I find it hard to turn down the offer of a super-twee musical with Belle and Sebastian’s aesthetic.
Criticism of the film’s shortcomings aren’t wrong, and I’m not going to say it’s the compelling and colorful fairytale I’d hoped it would be. Instead, it’s more like a series of music videos strung together by a simple love story; there’s a real strength in how light and carefree the film’s storytelling is. That limits it in some ways, but it also makes watching it often feel as breezy as listening to some of Belle and Sebastian’s music.
I’m not a big musical fan, so perhaps it was never really going to be for me. But I’m still holding out hope for a poppier, even more colorful and stylized take on a Belle and Sebastian musical. The ingredients are all there.
Check out 11 trailers from this week below.
Alright. Solo. Trailer two. How’s everyone feeling now? I would say… slightly better? Here’s the problem I still have: Han doesn’t say much in this trailer, and what he does say isn’t very compelling. Whereas, say, Lando is immensely charismatic. Of course, it’s easier to pull off that kind of scene-stealing charm when you’re not the main character (see: Han Solo in all the other movies), but striking that balance for Han was always the challenge facing the creators of Solo. The film comes out May 25th.
There’s a new trailer out for Incredibles 2 this week, and it continues to show how this is going to be a movie as much about superheroes as it is about parenting and all the challenges, joy, and humor that come with it. Of course, given the first Incredibles, it’s no surprise that this film is already looking like it’ll be something special. It comes out June 15th.
Here’s the latest trailer for Ocean’s 8, and, like the other Ocean’s films, it’s pure energy and fun. The revived film series returns with a brilliant cast, and it looks like it’s following the same formula that the last three took to great effect. It comes out June 8th.
Netflix has a new documentary coming up looking at the 13 female pilots who went through spaceflight tests around the same time the first men were planning to go up to space. While the 13 pilots never made it to space, their stories speak to the difficult and overlooked work women contributed to the US space program. It comes out April 20th.
What starts out looking like another film about an awkward Timothée Chalamet character (which, for the record, I would watch plenty of), turns into something much wilder after the protagonist starts selling weed and tries to make it big. So far, Hot Summer Nights looks like a great mix of awkward teen comedy with a pulpy crime story. It comes out July 27th.
The only action movies I care to watch are immensely over-the-top ones starring Jason Statham. This movie is about an enormous shark. It stars Jason Statham, and it knows just how ridiculous it is. I am definitely in. It comes out August 10th.
Ryan Murphy’s latest FX series is Pose, a big show about ball culture and 1980s New York. The show has already made headlines for casting five transgender actors in series regular roles — the most ever in a scripted show — which makes sense given the history it’s focused on. The show appears to be a really interesting mix between faux-documentary and a more traditional drama. It starts June 3rd.
After premiering at Sundance earlier this year, this incredible documentary is now headed to theaters: it’s about identical triplets who were separated at birth and found each other later in life. But it turns out, their separation was meant to be kept secret as part of a clearly unethical psychology experiment. And they weren’t the only twins separated. It comes out June 29th.
Amazon has a new limited series coming up that reimagines and remakes the 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, about three girls who disappeared while on a class trip in 1900 Australia. It looks pretty incredible visually and seems to echo recent dystopian films, despite its more grounded story. It comes out May 25th.
Girls star Zosia Mamet is one of the names behind Fabled, a new series that’s supposed to reimagine classic fairy tales from a feminist perspective. It’s a cool idea, though this first trailer only gives very basic hints of how it might pan out — including using these stories to explore mental illness. No word on when it arrives, but an episode is supposed to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.
What. On. Earth. Is this? James Franco co-directed this star-packed rip-off of Mad Maxfilled with some questionable female character tropes. Snoop Dogg costars as a character named Love Lord.
I’ll see you all next week.