The winds of fortune are with us this month, evidently. Local theaters are bringing in a ton of interesting August movies—big, small, and in between.
Spike Lee returns to the big screen on August 22 with Highest 2 Lowest, an update of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama High and Low. It gets even better: Lee is also reuniting with his favorite leading man, Denzel Washington, the world’s most charismatic human being.
The story follows record executive David King, who faces an increasingly dangerous moral dilemma when bad guys try to kidnap his son. What follows is a twisty and intricate procedural wrapped around the white-hot core of 21st-century New York City. Highest 2 Lowest premiered out of competition at this year’s Cannes film festival, with critics calling it one of Lee’s very best.
Also in the mix: Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, ASAP Rocky, and Ice Spice in her film debut. The movie will roll out on Apple TV+ in September, but Spike Lee’s films are made to be seen in theaters. Do the right thing.
Another alpha-dog filmmaker returning to theaters this month, Ethan Coen is back with Honey Don’t, a crime-caper neo-noir in the same key as his last film, last year’s Drive-Away Dolls. The new film is the second installment in a planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy” from Coen and his co-writer Tricia Cooke.
The new film stars Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator in California who gets mixed up with a nefarious megachurch operation. As with the previous series installment, Coen is clearly working in his dark comedy mode of eccentric characters and slapstick violence, powered this time around by a murder mystery plot engine.
Chris Evans is on board as the libidinous pastor, with the never-not-great Aubrey Plaza as Honey’s love interest. Check the online trailers for a sense of things. It’s got that elusive Coen vibe. The filmmakers have also released promotional videos for two soundtrack songs by Qualley’s musical alter-ego, Lace Manhattan.
A third option this month for anyone looking to park their head somewhere else entirely: Folktales, an intriguing doc out of Norway, chronicles a high school program that pairs teens with sled dogs in a kind of Outward Bound wilderness curriculum. The kids have to rely on each other, and the dogs, just to survive the Arctic conditions. According to the educators, the idea is to counterprogram against phones and memes, and modern life itself by waking up the students’ Stone Age brains.
The movie won a lot of hearts at Sundance (and our very own Full Frame Documentary Festival!) and combines several appealing elements: hopeful coming-of-age narratives, the healing power of nature, dictionary-definition counterculture initiatives, and good ideas out of northern Europe. Plus, of course, dogs.
Quick Picks
Cat people, we’ve got you, too: Several local theaters have booked the annual CatVideoFest, a curated compilation of home videos, animations, and classic viral spots celebrating the feline spirit. A portion of ticket proceeds goes to local cats in need.
The annual OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival returns to the Carolina Theatre in Durham, August 14-17, featuring an assortment of shorts, documentaries, and feature films. Among the highlights, Sane Inside Insanity – The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror celebrates the 50th anniversary of everyone’s favorite rite-of-passage midnight movie. Madness takes its toll.
If you need a safe movie for date night or visiting relatives, the comedy-drama My Mother’s Wedding stars Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, and Emily Beecham as three sisters who reunite for their mom’s latest nuptials. Writer-director Kristin Scott Thomas also plays the mom.
Sydney Sweeney and Halsey star in the crime thriller Americana, a kind of neo-Western heist movie concerning the fate of a sacred Lakota ghost shirt. Bonus local trivia: Writer-director Tony Tost is an accomplished scholar and poet who finished his Ph.D. at Duke.
The mischievous U.K. indie Ebony and Ivory proposes a comedic version of a legendary real-life musical summit between Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. The gist: Remote Scottish retreat. Paul is blissed out. Stevie is not into it. Hijinks ensue.
Dakota Johnson headlines the indie comedy Splitsville, which explores the delights and hazards of an open marriage. This one got great reviews out of Cannes as a kind of hard-R update of the classic 1940s screwball comedy.
Godzilla is enjoying a crazy run lately. Hardcore fans may want to hunt down Shin Godzilla, the highly acclaimed 2016 kaiju franchise entry, coming to North American theaters for the first time in the original Japanese (with subtitles) and a 4K digital remaster.
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