It’s a big weekend for smaller indie distributors – or at least not the biggest – as they spotted a weekend with nothing new from A24 or Neon and just one major studio opening in what has, and will be, been a crowded summer.
MCU’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the 800-pound gorilla – other studio films “cleared out of the weekend,” says one indie distribution executive. So edgier fare has a better shot. Sony Pictures Classics’ Oh, Hi! and Roadside Attractions’ The Home open on 1,000 screens, IFC’s House on Eden on 600. Magnolia doc Folktales, Oscilloscope’s Diciannove and Greenwich Entertainment’s Shoshana are limited releases, which can always be good counter-programming.
“Often in the summer you are constantly just fighting for screens and looking for whatever weekend you can get the most theaters,” said another exec. Not that it’s a breeze to find space, with tentpole fare from Lilo & Stitch and F1 to Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, I Know What You Did Last Summer and more playing.
Twisted rom-com Oh, Hi! from Sony Classics opens in moderate release on 1,000 screens. This bleakly comic look at modern dating is written and directed by Sophie Brooks and stars Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan and John Reynolds. Iris (Gordon) has met her perfect guy, Isaac (Lerman), and is enjoying their first romantic getaway together — what could go wrong? Premiered at Sundance, see Deadline review, and played at the Tribeca Festival.
Influencer found-footage horror House on Eden from IFC Films hits 600 theaters. The feature debut of popular social media content creators Kris Collins and Celina Myers, the duo known as KallMeKris and CelinaSpookyBoo, who have a collective audience of over 70 million followers. Written by Collins, who also stars alongside Myers and Jason-Christopher Mayer.
Paranormal investigators Kris, Celina and their videographer Jay expect the usual scares when they set out on their latest case. But after being mysteriously rerouted to an abandoned house deep in the woods, they find themselves facing a force unlike anything they’ve encountered before. As the night spirals into chaos, missing crew members and eerie phenomena hint at an ancient, malevolent presence watching.
Pete Davidson horror The Home by The Purge helmer James DeMonaco is looking to scare up audiences on 1,014 screens. World premiered outside competition at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival. Former SNL cast member Davidson stars as a rebellious twentysomething sentenced to community service at a quiet retirement home whose “special care” fourth-floor residents are strictly off-limits. As his suspicions grow and he digs deeper, he uncovers a chilling secret that puts both the residents’ lives and his own in grave danger. Written by DeMonaco and Adam Cantor.
Oscilloscope is out with TIFF-premiering Diciannove, the feature film debut of writer-director Giovanni Tortorici, produced by Luca Guadagnino. Limited, at the Angelika in New York and the Laemmle in L.A. The highs and lows of a restless youth collide headlong into the concrete realities of adulthood when Leonardo, a teenager from Palermo, leaves home for the first time. His studies land him in Siena, by way of London, where he clashes with his instructor, the curriculum and, most chaotically, with himself. Stars Manfredi Marini, Vittoria Planeta, Zackari Delmas, Dana Giuliano and Luca Lazzareschi.
Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana from Greenwich Entertainment debuts at 56 locations. In New York City at the Quad Cinema and AMC Empire; in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Town Center. Inspired by real events, the TIFF-premiering political thriller is set in the 1930s in Tel Aviv, a brand new European, Jewish city being built on the shores of the Mediterranean. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is in love with the city and with Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Wilkin works with Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling) in the anti-terrorist squad of the British Palestine Police force, chasing the charismatic poet and underground leader Avraham Stern (Aury Alby). Stern believes Israel can only be built through violence and Wilkin and Morton are his targets. Shoshana, like most of Tel Aviv, is modern, progressive and feminist. She hates the politics of Stern and his followers. But as the violence builds everyone is forced to choose a side. See Winterbottom with co-writers Laurence Coriat and Paul Viragh at Deadline’s TIFF Studio.
Sundance-premiering documentary Folktales from Magnolia Pictures, by Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, opens at New York’s IFC Center, with filmmaker Q&As Friday-Sunday; tonight’s is sold out. The helmers follow three teenagers over the course of a gap year at one of arctic Norway’s folk high schools, where they learn to care for themselves and a pack of sled dogs in the stark and beautifully captured Scandinavian wilderness. Adds L.A. and other markets next weekend. The doc addresses teenage alienation in the smartphone age and one aspirational solution: stripping away the screens in favor of dogs, survival instincts and each other.
2000 Meters To Andriivka by Oscar and Pulitzer Prize winner Mstyslav Chernov from PBS Distribution/Frontline/AP is a journey through the trenches of Ukraine and winner of the Sundance Directing Award for World Cinema Documentary. Opens in New York at Film Forum and at the Laemmle Monica in L.A. next weekend.
The team behind 20 Days In Mariupol documents the toll of the Russia-Ukraine war from a personal and devastating vantage point. Following his historic account of the civilian toll in Mariupol, Chernov turns his lens towards Ukrainian soldiers — who they are, where they came from and the impossible decisions they face in the trenches as they fight for every inch of their land. Amid a failing counteroffensive in 2023, Chernov and his AP colleague Alex Babenko follow a Ukrainian brigade battling through approximately one mile of a heavily fortified forest on their mission to liberate the Russian-occupied village of Andriivka.
Jewish Western Guns & Moses by Salvador Litvak, about a heat-packing rabbi, opens on 100+ screens from Concourse Media and Pictures From the Fringe. With Mark Feuerstein, Neal McDonough, Alona Tal and Jackson Dunn alongside Christopher and Dermot Mulroney. Written by Salvador and Nina Litkvak, the action-thriller follows Rabbi Mo, a humble leader in a high-desert Jewish community who is thrust into the role of reluctant warrior after a violent attack shakes his world. What begins as a search for justice quickly evolves into a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game across the Mojave.
Comedy AJ Goes to the Dog Park from Music Box Films’ Doppelgänger Releasing label opens limited in select markets including NYC (Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan); L.A. (Alamo Drafthouse DTLA); Austin (Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar); Washington, D.C. (Alamo Drafthouse Loudoun); and Boulder (Dairy Arts Center). Rollout started July 15 at Music Box in Chicago and a handful of other markets. Road show continues through early September with appearances by writer-director Toby Jones, star AJ Thompson and the Demon Lord Krogloch (aka producer Ben Hanson). Premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024. Also stars Greg Carlson, Danny Davy and Morgan Hoyt Davyy.
In humdrum Fargo, ND, an ordinary man named AJ is content with his mundane existence and rejects any interruption to his tranquility, including a promotion at work – offered by his boss who happens to be his dad. Unfortunately, the despotic local mayor has converted his dog park into a “blog park” – where happy dog walkers have been replaced with corporate stooges hunched over their laptops. Thus begins a chain reaction that completely upends AJ’s existence.
Kino Lorber documentary Shari & Lamb Chop, a portrait of trailblazing children’s entertainer Shari Lewis and her beloved sock puppet Lamb Chop from Emmy-nominated filmmaker Lisa D’Apolito (Love, Gilda), opens at the Quad in New York. Before Fred Rogers and Jim Henson, there was Lewis, a children’s television pioneer whose whimsical characters and ebullient spirit guided generations of children as they came of age. The doc chronicles her early years of TV success to the crush of her show’s cancellation to her 1990s comeback in her 60s. World premiered at DOC NYC. Expands to L.A. next week.