Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, the fifth Toy Story film comes home, continuing Pixar’s undefeated run with that particular franchise. Today also features Evil Dead Burn hitting shelves, alongside Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, I Love Boosters, and Scary Movie. Plus, there’s also a pair of high profile Criterion Collection releases in Nouvelle Vague (look for my new chat with Zoey Deutch about the film later on this week) and The Secret Agent. What else is coming out? Read on to find out…
Joey’s Top Pick
Toy Story 5
It’s kind of shocking that Toy Story 5 justifies its existence. The fourth Toy Story sequel, it would have been easy to just coast for Pixar, but they somehow turned out an upper echelon story. I was absolutely bowled over with how much this one works. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d see a sixth movie if they made it. My rave review here on the site began like so:
Pixar, I’m sorry that I ever doubted you. I’ve been on record that the original three Toy Story films are perfect and one of the great trilogies. So, especially when Toy Story 3 ended so brilliantly, why tempt fate? Then, Toy Story 4 came and defied the odds, being a more than worthy sequel (Lightyear I consider a separate thing from these, for what that’s worth). Given how unlikely that had felt, continuing on always felt like a huge risk. After all, when will their luck run out? Well, it’s not with Toy Story 5, which is not just great, but better than the prior installment, standing nearly toe to toe with the first three.
Toy Story 5 is a beautiful ode to the power of play, while also being a moving meditation on the passage of time. Throw in the franchise’s most subversive plot and there’s more going on here than meets the eye. All of the classic Toy Story elements are here, as are almost all of our favorite characters, but the focus this time is different, and even sharper.
Also Available This Week
Bulletproof (4K)
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (Interview here with Zoey Deutch, Ken Marino, and David Wain)
Girls Like Girls
Interview with the Vampire (4K SteelBook)
Landman: Season Two (TV)
Outlander: Season Eight (TV)
Suzume (4K)
Criterion Corner
Nouvelle Vague
From The Criterion Collection: “It’s 1959, and a young Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) is the only one among his film-critic peers at Cahiers du cinéma not to have made a feature film. Determined to put his revolutionary cinematic ideas into practice, he brings his small crew and two stars—an eager unknown named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and wary Hollywood expat Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch)—onto the streets of Paris to shoot Breathless, an adventure in unfettered creativity that would soon upend the way movies are made. With this enthralling love letter from one cinematic maverick to another, director Richard Linklater captures, with buoyant humor and effortless charm, the intoxicating joy of being young, breaking all the rules, and making art without boundaries.”
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The Secret Agent
From The Criterion Collection: “With an electrifying blend of kinetic punch and elegiac historical sweep, Kleber Mendonça Filho connects life under Brazil’s twentieth-century military dictatorship to the living present, delivering a kaleidoscopic period thriller pulsing with resonance. In 1977, under the alias Marcelo, a man (Wagner Moura) arrives in the city of Recife to try to make a fresh start with his young son. However, the threat of violence immediately encroaches, while around him swirl corrupt cops, grimy hit men, haunted exiles, and a wild urban legend that ignites a public frenzy. Continually spinning off its temporal and narrative axes, The Secret Agent unfurls an epic canvas teeming with life and love for those who refuse to submit to systems of oppression.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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