Following its premiere at Cannes 2021, it was announced that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria would only play in a single cinema at a time, touring the world long enough for everyone to see it. That strategy was abandoned following an Oscar-qualifying run at the end of last year, and the film began playing in various cities on April 1. “Mysterious and unexplainable… a poetic slow-burn of a movie,” is a representative reaction from Darren Carver-Balsiger. For Journal, Weerasethakul spoke with Mitchell Beaupre about his first film shot outside Thailand.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (credited together as Daniels) take the culty oddness of their previous film, Swiss Army Man, to the next level with Everything Everywhere All at Once, a glorious wonder film that manages to incorporate more of legendary lead actor Michelle Yeoh’s amazingly varied talents than (arguably) any of her previous roles. The multiverse comedy/​drama/​adventure is now in theaters after premiering at SXSW (it definitely showed up in our Best of SXSW feature), and is provoking wild enthusiasm from almost all who see it, like Sophie: “The masterful visuals, ridiculously fun action sequences, and sharp editing equated to an unforgettable theater experience.” Saturday Night Live cast member Bowen Yang had this to say: “One of the best things I’ve ever seen in my piece of s—t life.” The essence of kindness that EEAAO presents is very much what the world needs right now, which may explain why the film has wushu-rope-darted its way over Parasite to become the highest-rated film on Letterboxd.

On the release schedule for what felt like several decades, Morbius is finally out. Venom proved that films centered around the Spider-Man villains that Sony owns the rights to can be successful, but Morbius (a vampire-type guy) is not nearly as well-known a character. Still, many seem to enjoy a hammy Jared Leto performance, and they’ve been emphasizing the film’s (somewhat specious) connections to the MCU in the trailers by including a poster of Spider-Man, and Spider-Man: Homecoming villain Adrian Toomes AKA The Vulture (Michael Keaton). It’s exhausting just writing that.

Judd Apatow’s latest movie The Bubble is about a bunch of Hollywood types sequestered in a hotel while shooting a blockbuster during the pandemic. It may be the first time that the logline of a movie also describes the circumstances around the shooting of said movie… which was shot during the pandemic… with a Hollywood cast… sequestered at a hotel in England. Burgeoning Apatow spawn Iris Apatow (sister of Euphoria’s Maude) stars alongside Keegan-Michael Key, David Duchovny, Maria Bakalova and others. “Pedro Pascal and Karen Gillan in the same movie is actually a guaranteed five stars”, is Cameron’s feeling about all these pandemic projects having such stacked casts. We guess everyone was available and, to quote Daniel Radcliffe again, “dramatically bored”. (Now in theaters and on Netflix.)

Speaking of Gillan, writer-director Riley Stearns, who’s been carving out a unique space in American independent cinema with his singular films Faults and The Art of Self-Defense, goes high-concept for his third feature, the deadpan sci-fi black comedy Dual, in which Gillan must fight her own clone to the death after unexpectedly recovering from a terminal disease. Aaron Paul and Beulah Koale co-star in the movie described by David Chen as a “darkly comedic, slow-burn thriller in the spirit of Yorgos Lanthimos… Karen Gillan is perfect”. Jacob likes that “Stearns takes some familiar sci-fi concepts and combines them into something truly strange and deeply compelling.” (In theaters April 15.)

English filmmaker Andrea Arnold, known for emotionally intimate, verité-leaning films like Fish Tank and American Honey, goes full non-fiction for the documentary Cow, which follows the life of a cow named Luma. Rowan Abbot warns against writing the film off because of its seemingly simple premise. “In execution… Andrea creates something beautiful.” “Deeply profound and strikingly resonant,” concurs Aomame333. Ragua likes the empathy generated by the film: “Maybe understanding non-human animals isn’t as hard as they have us believe.” (In theaters April 8.)

It seems like they’re just striding ahead with the Harry Potter prequels that nobody seems to particularly like, despite constantly having to sidestep issues involving their cast and creator. The presence of Letterboxd fave Mads Mikkelsen (replacing a scandal-plagued Johnny Depp as villain Grindelwald) makes us a bit more amenable to the latest entry, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which centers Jude Law’s younger, gayer (well, we’ll see) version of the beloved Hogwarts headmaster. (In theaters April 15.)

With just two full-length features under his belt, Robert Eggers has quickly established himself as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. For a certain kind of cineaste, his third movie, The Northman, may just be the most anticipated movie of the year (our stats certainly point that way). Just putting the words ‘Robert’ and ‘Eggers‘ next to ‘Viking’, ‘revenge’ and ‘saga’ is enough to send some of us into a panic spiral of anticipation. And that’s before you get to the frankly insane cast, a list that starts with Alexander Skarsgård (who played a character named Eric Northman in True Blood), then carries on with Nicole Kidman (who played Skarsgård’s wife in Big Little Lies, and plays his mother here), Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang and Björk, before hitting previous Eggers collaborators Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson (all from The Witch) and Willem Dafoe (from The Lighthouse). I’m dead. (In theaters April 22.)

Method actor. Indie actor. Acclaimed actor. Oscar-winning actor. Action-movie actor. Over-actor. Affordable actor. Self-aware actor. National treasure. The long and winding arc of Nicolas Cage’s career reaches its crescendo with meta comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage portrays a version of himself that plays off his public perception. Pedro Pascal joins the fun as a rich, potentially evil Cage superfan who offers the actor a large payday to make a personal appearance at his birthday, then finds himself in Cage’s crosshairs when the actor is recruited by the CIA to bring his host to justice. We couldn’t be more onboard with this. (In theaters April 22.)

Few filmmakers inspire as much devotion on Letterboxd as French writer and director Céline Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire sits at a phenomenal 4.4 average rating. Petite Maman (in theaters April 22) is her gentle, snack-sized (72 minutes, including credits), kid-centric follow-up. Lucy says watching the movie is “like unwrapping a present from someone who loves you”. “A remarkable, mesmerizing piece of cinema… feels like a throwback to the innocence of childhood, and also sometimes a throwback to French new wave cinema,” writes Kall S. Sciamma also has a writing credit on Jacques Audiard’s new film Paris, 13th District, alongside Audiard, Léa Mysius and Nicolas Livecchi, with Portrait lead Noémie Merlant starring. That film was adapted from some short stories by Adrian Tomine and is out April 15.

Gasper Noé, the provocative French director behind intense cinematic experiences such as Irreversible, Enter the Void and Climax, slows things down a bit for Vortex, starring iconic Italian filmmaker Dario Argento (director of Suspiria) and Françoise Lebrun as a couple suffering from dementia. Bruce Tetsuya calls it “Noe’s most accessible and maturely directed film to date”, while Morris Yang warns that “Noé’s days as a provocateur aren’t over; even with Vortex, his most accessible, placid and depressing film to date, the filmmaker continues his unquiet mapping of the absolute end, gazing into the human perception and reality of the abyss with a brutal inquisitiveness that most will shy away from”. So, a comedy then? (In theaters April 29.)

You know how when you watched The Worst Person in the World, you came out with a profound desire to run down the same Oslo streets as Julie? Well, so did Ella Kemp, so we sent her there. The lucky sod got a tour of Oslo from one of the film’s leads, Anders Danielsen Lie (who also starred in the other two films in Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy), Trier’s constant collaborator Eskil Vogt and film journalist Karsten Meinich. Ella reports back in the first of an ongoing series we’ve titled Cool World, where writers explore memorable movie locations. Our DMs are open for Cool World pitches—drop us a line telling us why your corner of the world is a top spot for cinephiles.

Tell you what, they sure made some good movies in them there 1980s. Paul Anthony Johnson has ranked what he considers to be the top hundred in his Best Movies of the 1980s list. Verhoeven in the top ten, we respect it. Rolling Stone also recently chimed in with their 100 Greatest Movies of the 1980s, but don’t include any Verhoeven at all! For shame! But they do have Midnight Run (egregiously snubbed by Paul), so most is forgiven.

Journal contributor Kate Hagen takes a deeply personal dive into cinematic fat phobia and the history of bigger-bodied female representation on screen in her essay ‘Fat Girls on Film or: How I Learned to Stop Hating My Body and Start Demanding More from Hollywood’. It’s a special read. We’re all in for the future films inspired by this piece.

All My Friends Hate Me (now available on VOD) is a troublingly relatable and excruciatingly hilarious new English film about a group of college chums reconnecting over a weekend in a manor house. Ostensibly a black comedy, it often feels like a social-anxiety horror. Editor-at-large Dominic Corry (hello!) was so blown away by the film at last year’s Tribeca that he demanded an interview with co-writers Tom Stourton (who also stars) and Tom Palmer. They talk about all the influences that went into the making of their unique proposition in this story for Journal.

There’s a fascinating variety of titles featured in Kate’s list of films that have inspired the work, cover art, or stylings of the English band, The Smiths. I [Dom, your abovementioned Call Sheet editor] saw Morrissey pretending to browse at a West Hollywood Rite Aid once. The concept of shopping seemed foreign to him.

With her film Master now streaming on Amazon Prime, writer-director Mariama Diallo shared with us her Master Movie Club, a virtual film club she convened with her cast when the pandemic paused production on the film and they went into lockdown. In the list notes, Diallo also provides her thoughts on the films (all bangers). Letterboxd account when, Mariama?

Mothers are the best. Well, mostly. Ethelred has compiled a list of cinema’s Worst Mothers, proving that poor maternal parenting can generate great cinema. We had forgotten about that bit in Shazam! and now we’re sad.

Montenore’s amusingly short list of movies that were released in 2021 in which Benedict Cumberbatch puts on an American accent and has a strange relationship with a boy in his late teens named Peter who has a dead dad, telling the boy at some point in the film not to call him “sir” has proved somewhat popular and gone a little viral. Andrea even showed it to Benedict himself at an Oscars after party, nice!

It’s time for Dom’s Pick! Each month, Call Sheet editor Dominic Corry ends with a film for your watchlists. This week: The Wild Life. One of only two directorial efforts from venerable producer Art Linson (the other being the 1980 Bill Murray-starring Hunter S. Thompson biopic Where the Buffalo Roam), this weirdly underseen 1984 comedy was clearly conceived as an unofficial sequel to the Linson-produced 1982 hit Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and depicts similar characters in the next phase of their (aspirationally wild) lives.

Fast Times bit player Eric Stoltz stars as Bill, a teenage high-school dropout a little too eager to begin his adult life in the San Fernando Valley. The late Chris Penn (brother of Fast Times breakout Sean Penn) plays his meathead pal Tom, and Leah Thompson is Bill’s ex, Anita, a teenage donut-store worker having an affair with a cop (Hart Bochner). The great Jenny Wright (Near Dark) plays Anita’s punk-ish pal Eileen. Stoltz, Penn and Thompson are essentially loose iterations of the characters played by Judge Reinhold, the older Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, respectively, in Fast Times, and Cameron Crowe returned to write the screenplay.

There’s a surprising amount of overlap with Licorice Pizza (although PTA told me he’s never seen The Wild Life), from the deep-in-the-valley kids mucking around to Stoltz’s red-headed, money-making teen to Bochner’s cop, who strongly evokes Bradley Cooper’s Jon Peters. It’s also the first of three cinematic romantic pairings between Stoltz and Thompson (if you count Back to the Future, in which Stoltz was replaced by Michael J. Fox after several weeks of shooting).

Although messy at times (the strip-club scene has not aged well), it’s a fascinating ’80s oddity and must-see for anyone who likes Fast Times (especially the mall parts). Worth it solely for the hilarious supporting performance from Rick Moranis (in the same year he broke out in Ghostbusters) as a New Wave tragic. See you next month.