In summer the movie house is everything but quiet, its worlds all chaos, raging. Is the summer night like a perfection of thought? Not for the moviegoer, who shuffles from outside heat to cool theater like an automaton, as if fueled by his own dashed hopes. Last year, the summer movie season was bookended by delirium and nightmare, two fine trailers for the endless, hallucinatory winter that was to come. Watching summer blockbusters can often feel like plunging your head into the acid bath of the American unconscious id, the only respite being the few seconds when you can bring your liquified face up for air. Here are this summer’s ten opportunities to breathe.
The BPoFD Summer Movie Preview: 2017 Edition
10. It Comes At Night (June 9th)
Trey Edward Shult’s directorial debut, Krisha, was a flawed, tension-filled fever dream about a troubled woman who crashes her family’s Thanksgiving dinner, a horrifying situation that begged audiences to ask, “When is this guy gonna make another horror movie?” As you wish.
9. Lowriders (May 12th)
One of our generation’s most underrated actors. The role Eva Longoria was born to play. Tagging. Rims. And teen angst? Lowriders could be the Mexican Garden State that we’ve been waiting for. In all seriousness though, this intimate, homegrown flick is already primed to be the year’s best forgotten film.
8. A Ghost Story (July 7th)
So this is where Casey Affleck has been hiding all those sexual assault allegations: in gorgeous promotional posters.
7. The Bad Batch (June 23rd)
From the acclaimed director of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the basic premise of The Bad Batch is A Girl Walks Into A Camp of Post-Apocalyptic Cannibals. In the film, Keanu Reeves has a mustache.
6. Wonder Woman (June 2nd)
The best part of BvS: DoJ will forever be Wonder Woman’s porn metal theme music.
5. The Big Sick (June 23rd)
Based on the actual courtship of its now-married screenwriters, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, The Big Sick is about a Pakistani immigrant who falls in love with a white girl in a coma. In addition to Nanjiani, the film also stars Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather outed his friends as communists to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
4. Dunkirk (July 21st)
Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s last film, imagined a world where humans would rather leave the earth than live as vegans. Dunkirk continues the trend of unnecessary evacuation, following a group of Allied soldiers who’d rather leave the beach than share it with Germans.
3. Baby Driver (June 28th)
Edgar Wright directed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Ansel Elgort can dunk.
2. The Beguiled (June 23rd)
Her first theatrical release since 2013’s The Bling Ring, Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled is a remake of an adaptation of an obscure novel of the same name. It follows an injured Union soldier (Colin Farrell) who plows his way through a Confederate girls’ boarding school, seducing Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning en route to his presumable castration.
1. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (July 21st)
In the last Luc Besson sci-fi film, Scarlett Johansson achieves 100% brain usage, rides to the dawn of time in an office chair, and transforms into an omniscient ooze monster/computer server. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets promises to fly even closer to a distant alien sun, building on the grand tradition of Dune, Southland Tales, and Jupiter Ascending to deliver both a feast for the eyes and a fuck for the mind.
baby pictures of famous dictators 