The first big wave of summer movie season is cresting just now, so for the next several weeks, the multiplexes will be flooded with superhero movies and franchise installments. If you’re seeking calmer waters, take heart: There’s still a nice selection of interesting, smaller films coming to the area.
40 Acres, the feature film debut of veteran TV director R.T. Thorne, is a post-apocalypse thriller with a twist. The setup: A fungal plague has wiped out all animal life on earth, setting civilization back several millennia to agrarian basics. In rural Canada, the Freeman family is one of the lucky few with their own farm to cultivate. Unfortunately, that means defending their land from attacks by wandering bands of cannibals. It’s a protein thing.
Director Thorne delivers a clever version of the home invasion thriller, but as the title suggests, he’s also thinking about American history. The title refers to the U.S. government’s 1865 broken promise to provide 40 acres and a mule to each freed slave after the Civil War. The film’s heroine, Hailey Freeman, is a Black woman whose family has owned their farm since fleeing the Reconstruction and resettling in Canada in 1875.
It’s a good example of how speculative fiction, with a subtle backstory tweak, can get to thematic places that would be difficult otherwise. The film debuted at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and earned enthusiastic reviews for its merits as a scary-ass future-tense thriller.
Another independent film opening locally this month, Sorry, Baby, is getting written up all over the place as one of the year’s best movies. The directorial debut of writer/director/star Eva Victor, the film tells the story of Agnes, a young college professor who survives a campus assault and must navigate a subsequent gauntlet of clueless and/or uncaring doctors, therapists, and university bureaucrats.
It sounds heavy, but the film is deliberately calibrated to an emotional register that allows for humor, melancholy, and the endless subtleties of trauma and healing. The nature of the assault is kept in the blurry background to foreground character and relationships, especially the friendship between Agnes and her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie).
Check out the film’s trailer online and you’ll see that the film manages moments of real comedy, too—the kind of comedy that’s rooted in honesty, vulnerability, and emotional connection. (The best kind, in other words.)
A third option for July is the ambitious and apparently quite provocative Eddington, a wigged-out dramatization of contemporary American psychosis dressed as a neo-Western thriller. Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as the sheriff and mayor, respectively, of a mid-sized New Mexico town deeply rattled by the events of 2020.
Writer-director Ari Aster is taking big swings with this one, documenting our ongoing nervous breakdown with the town of Eddington standing in for America herself. Aster throws everything in the pot: The George Floyd protests, the lockdowns, conspiracy theories, racism, anti-racism, wealth distribution, gun culture, middle-class radicalism, Big Tech recklessness, and the relentless online amplification of anger and righteousness.
Early reviews suggest that Aster at least attempts to give equal rhetorical weight to various POVs along the ideological spectrum. But that’s forever in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? I suspect people will be talking about this one.
Quick Picks
Aside from the big blockbusters, summer is also the season for low-budget horror movies, and there’s a zombie swarm of them coming in July: House on Eden (found footage horror), Saint Clare (religious horror), Together (body horror), Skillhouse (online horror), and The Home (Pete Davidson horror). But for my scary movie dollar, I’m going with Abraham’s Boys, an update to the Dracula mythos concerning Abe Van Helsing’s unfortunate kids. Sins of the father, eh boys?
Starting on July 18, the Carolina Theatre in Durham will be screening the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, featuring seven curated shorts from this year’s festival.
The Cary Theater is bringing in the acclaimed documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which profiles the career of the beloved actress and deaf culture activist. The film eschews traditional voice-overs for open caption and American Sign Language narration.
The Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill has booked Kill The Jockey, a comedy-thriller from Argentine filmmaker Luis Ortega. I encourage you, most sincerely, to go find the trailer online.
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