Happy Friday! An R-rated comedy about a beloved childhood game, the next chapter in a beloved, family-friendly superhero saga, a much-delayed mafia movie, and a doc on the unhappy animals in your Happy Meals are all new to theaters—so whether you’re spending the next few days partaking in your city’s Pride festivities, or basking in the afterglow or anticipation of the celebrations, take a little self-care break and go see something on the big screen! Here’s the rundown on this week’s most recent releases:
Tag
What’s more admirable: that this is based on a true story about a REAL decades-long game of tag, or that this trailer manages to show seriously funny ladies Leslie Bibb, Rashida Jones, and Isla Fisher for a grand total of about two collective seconds? They are all pretty major characters, we swear. Hamm, Renner, Buress, Helms, and Johnson (who, by all accounts, may as well just still be playing Nick from New Girl) may seem like an odd mix to play the real-life childhood friends who still take a month out of each year to be jerks and chase each other around, but we have a feeling that they’ll play off of each other in some interesting ways. Besides being as good a primer as any on how to keep adult friendships alive into your thirties and beyond, Tag is a chance to mix classic slapstick with Apatow-style buddy comedy. It will also, invariably, be at least a little sad—the one game of tag we’re guaranteed to lose, after all, is always the one we play with death.
Incredibles 2
So it’s been almost fifteen years since The Incredibles was released. That was three presidents ago! When The Incredibles came out in theaters, people still used those multi-colored iPods—are you getting the picture here? We’ve all grown, changed, and gone deeper into debt, and heck, probably a lot of us have had a whole bunch of kids, too, yet this beloved Pixar family is picking up right where they left off as if the Disney vault were some kind of magical suspended animation machine. Something like six hundred superhero movies have come out since we first met the Parrs (Bob, Helen, Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack), but absolutely none of them deal with family dynamics and coming-of-age woes in quite the same deft and tender way as this soon-to-be franchise. To make a long—fourteen years-long—story short, if you liked The Incredibles, you’re going to like Incredibles 2, and we’ve never met anyone who didn’t like The Incredibles. For heaven’s sake, it won multiple Academy Awards!
Gotti
The most dramatic thing about Gotti may well be its road to release: After director swaps, talent shakeups, and a period of being shelved for financial reasons, this fully authorized biopic is finally going to get to see the light of day—or rather, the darkened theater. Star John Travolta has come a long way since his days playing disco d-bag (and fellow scrappy New Yorker) Tony Manero, and it’s widely known that Gotti was his passion project. That said, the trailer seems decidedly lacking in passion! Even the car bomb exploding feels strangely clinical. Maybe that’s because this flick is trying to emphasize the “organized” part of organized crime, or maybe the movie will be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen (at last count, there were almost fifty producers listed on the project). But don’t worry y’all: At the very least, it’s got an original score by none other than Pitbull. Nothing says “classic New York mobster movie” like a Floridian rapper.
Eating Animals
Picture Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (The Movie), narrated by Queen Amidala. ‘Nuff said. Let’s face it: If we don’t make some serious changes to our collective eating habits and farming practices, we’ll all be subsisting on a robust diet of algae, soylent, and crickets before too long. Trust us, this movie isn’t trying to get you to give up your bacon-wrapped everything entirely in favor of a plant-based diet…it’s just trying to make a case for meat that’s made in a more humane, and, dare we say, sane manner. But does “happy” meat really taste better? There’s only one way to find out.
