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We’ve seen Elisabeth Moss take on corporate male toxicity in Mad Men, a ghost of a man in The Invisible Man, Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale and punk rock in Her Smell. This weekend we’ll see her try her as a horror author who tries not unravel as she goes through her creative process in the Josephine Decker-directed Shirley.
The film, which is adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel of the same name, bowed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and is based on the real-life horror author Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman.
“We were not making a film that we ever thought, ‘Oh, we’re making a film about the real Shirley Jackson’,” Decker told Deadline at Sundance. “In fact, the script really meshed up a bunch of timelines in the real Shirley Jackson’s life, so it absolutely was a fiction. None of the things that are in the film could have happened in real life because of just the way that the time worked out… I think we were very clear that this is definitely a fictional person that we’re creating. And so that gave us a lot more freedom.”
Adapted by Sarah Gubbins, Shirley won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking. The film follows the titular author who is working on her next masterpiece but when newlyweds (Odessa Young and Logan Lerman) come to town, it throws a wrench into her meticulous routine and stirs the pot in her already tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband (Michael Stuhlbarg). As a result, the cynical, day-drinking middle-aged couple begins to toy mercilessly with the naïve young couple.
The film from Neon will drop on Hulu, VOD, virtual cinemas and participating drive-ins starting today. Watch the trailer below.
Directed by two-time Emmy winner Cheryl Horner McDonough, the documentary Parkland Rising puts the spotlight on the students of Parkland who sparked an international movement — a revolution, some may say — which called attention to the need for better gun safety laws.
The film urges viewers to stand up and get involved as it documents the grassroots gun reform movement with enlightening footage that is a call to action when to end mass shootings. We see their efforts to get the gun lobby out of politics by turning out record numbers of youth voters while facing gun-carrying counter-protesters, an onslaught of online vitriol, and even death threats.
From Executive Producers Katie Couric and will.i.am, the film features Jaclyn Corin, Matt & Ryan Deitsch, Emma Gonzalez, Fred Guttenberg (Father of Jaime Guttenberg), Lauren and David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Jammal Lemy, Patricia and Manuel Oliver (Parents of Joaquin Oliver), Ronit Reoven (MSD Teacher), Aly Sheehy, and Sam Zeif along with music provided by AJR, Black Eyed Peas, Sammy Brue, Bob Dylan, Michael Franti, and Pearl Jam.
On June 2, Abramorama held a special live virtual screening and Katie Couric-moderated Q&A with will.i.am, Manuel Oliver, Greg Kahn, Cheryl Horner McDonough and Manju Bangalore. An encore “Wear Orange” live screening was set for today but has since been postponed to a later date. However, Parkland Rising is in virtual cinemas nationwide starting today for a two-week run.
Watch the trailer below.
Abel Ferrar’s Tommaso starring Willem Dafoe opens virtually today via Kino Marquee in New York at Film at Lincoln Center as well as Laemmle, Acropolis Cinema and Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles. The drama will also debut in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, among others. There will also be nationally simulcast live Q&As with Ferrara and Dafoe.
The film made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and marks Ferrara’s first dramatic feature since 2014’s Pasolini, which also stars Dafoe. The pair are frequent collaborators and in Tommaaso, Dafoe plays the titular character, an American expat living in Rome with his young wife and their daughter. A filmmaker, he’s been preparing for his next project but struggles as he attempts to reconcile his past with his present.
Filmmakers Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott is set to give us thrills this weekend with Becky starring Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Amanda Brugel, Robert Maillet and Joel McHale. The film is set to drop on demand, digital, select theaters and drive-ins starting today.
Written by Nick Morris and Ruckus Skye & Lane Skye, the film gives us classic home invasion horror vibes. An official selection for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, Becky follows the title character played by Wilson as she is brought on a weekend getaway with her father (Joel McHale) as a way to connect after her mother’s death. Things take a crazy turn when a group of on-the-run convicts led by Dominick (Kevin James) invade their house.
A very much deserved deep dive into the Vegas glitz, glamour and iconic campiness of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is hitting on demand and digital via Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi starting June 9.
The docu from RLJE Films takes a look at the beloved 1995 pic starring Elizabeth Berkley as a small town girl-turned-Vegas dance. You Don’t Nomi (obviously, the title is a play on Berkley’s character’s name) features film critics and superfans as they explore the movie’s complicated afterlife as it went from critical dud to being redeemed as an extraordinary cult classic.
Mia Wasikowska stars alongside Damon Herriman, Terry Norris, Gillian Jones and Tom Budge in the Mirrah Foulkes-directed Judy and Punch from Samuel Goldwyn Films. Debuting today on digital, the dark comedy follows puppeteers Judy and Punch as they revive their marionette show to great success in the town of Seaside. When Judy becomes the star of the show, the whiskey-guzzling Punch isn’t too fond of that. After tragedy strikes and Punch thinks he has killed Judy, she comes back with a vengeance.
Just in time for World Environment Day, 2040 opens today in virtual theaters. The film from Damon Gameau takes a look at what the future could look like by the year 2040 (hence the title) if the population embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream. Gameau frames the film as a visual letter to his 4-year-old daughter combining documentary elements and dramatized sequences to create a vision board of the future.
2040 was originally set to have live Q&As with their release but has decided to postpone them to a later date.
Also opening this weekend is Bruce McDonald’s thriller Dreamland starring Stephen McHattie, Henry Rollins and Juliette Lewis. Set during the night of a bizarre wedding, the film follows a killer who is hired by a gang boss to acquire the finger of a drug-addicted jazz legend — that is wild. On June 9, Tim True’s drama Here Awhile hits digital. The film stars Anna Camp as a terminally ill woman who returns to Oregon to reconnect with her brother and end her life under the state’s Death with Dignity Act. Mark Jackson’s Slamdance pic The Teacher, which also arrives on VOD June 9, follows a French Muslim woman (Hafsia Herzi) as she travels from Paris to New York City to visit her best friend only to have it go horribly wrong. She escapes to a cabin upstate for some peace but it turns into a nightmare.