In an era when wide-release films sometimes feel more homogenized than ever, it’s important that we don’t take a new David Cronenberg film for granted. That said, he’s never been about pleasing everybody, and following its Cannes premiere last month, Crimes of the Future is proving typically divisive. Isaac Feldberg spoke to the organic-horror king about Wordle scores and surgery as the new you-know-what. David Sims liked what he saw, admitting a weakness for “an elegiac ‘am I losing my edge’ movie from an aging master”, while Matt Lynch writes “it’s so literal and cheeky that it borders on self-parody”. Joe Aragon knows this is a film that will make “Crone-heads rejoice!” and celebrates it as “a delirious concoction of sex-infused body horror with the classic Cronenberg exploration of human evolution (among many other things)”. (Now in theaters.)

Saturday Night Live breakout star of the moment Bowen Yang (who has a Letterboxd account, where you can file your love along with everyone else) teams up with comedian Joel Kim Booster for Hulu’s Fire Island, a queer riff on Pride & Prejudice that follows a group of gay besties on a trip to the iconic holiday destination off Long Island, New York. Nick says there’s “No better way to usher in summer and Pride month—in the gayest way possible!”. There’s something for almost everyone, including those who like to flirt over Alice Munro. Fair warning: this is not about the Fyre Festival. (Streaming now.)

Contemporary horror queen Maika Monroe (who broke out with It Follows) carries Chloe Okuna’s Hitchcock-influenced thriller Watcher. Annie Lyons spoke to Okuna for Journal about the works that influenced her feature debut, the importance of curtains in voyeurism films, and why Stanley Donen’s Charade keeps showing up in Maika Monroe movies. (Now in theaters.)

One of the more quietly curious films to premiere at last year’s Tribeca, Noah Dixon and Ori Segev’s Poser follows a timid young woman named Lennon (Sylvie Mix) who ingratiates herself into the Columbus, Ohio indie-band scene by latching onto a confident performer named Bobbi Kitten (playing a version of herself). It’s an interesting modern riff on Single White Female that benefits from a rare authentic portrait of an underground arts culture. “Because so many of us in the Millennial/Zoomer crowd have anxieties related to [coolness and authenticity] and whether or not we possess them, Lennon is uncomfortably relatable. Perhaps that is what makes Poser so haunting,” writes Kong. (Now in theaters.)

With Top Gun: Maverick having set a high bar for crowd-pleasing legacy sequels, Jurassic World Dominion only needs to leap the low bar of its own middling Jurassic World prequels. Even so, early reviews suggest the best thing they got right was the return of the original film’s core trio, Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, back together for the first time since that 1993 film upped the blockbuster ante forever. “Sam Neill still slays,” writes Cinematologist; “Jeff carried,” says SamNuts; “Laura Dern is radiant. An icon,” swoons Lauren. (The trouble-plagued production, shut down several times due to Covid flare-ups, was apparently the inspiration for Judd Apatow’s recent Netflix comedy The Bubble, which followed the stars of the sixth iteration of a blockbuster franchise.) (Now in theaters.)

Phil Tippett is the stop-motion animation maestro responsible for the holographic chess scene in the original Star Wars and the ED-209 droid in RoboCop. When CGI began to overtake stop-motion, Tippett pragmatically moved with the times, bringing his skill for movement to films like Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. His passion project, Mad God, thirty years in the making, constitutes a glorious stop-motion animation throwback, and is one of the most effectively nightmarish movies to ever be released. Alexei Toliopolous nails it when he calls it “rusty and oozy… overwhelming in its visual imagination… a fascinating experience of juxtaposing scales that provide so much surprise and grimy delight.” Kambole Campbell talked to Tippett about building the film, bit by bit. (On Shudder from June 16.)

Remember Craig Roberts, the kid from Submarine? He’s a director now, and he spoke to our editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood about his new film The Phantom of the Open, an unbelievable true story starring Mark Rylance as an optimistic chancer who blags his way into the 1976 British Golf Open. “A terrific little gem of a film that’s both heart-warming and hilarious,” says Josh Barton. “Like if Paddington was a movie about golf,” is an apt comparison from Inds—screenwriter Simon Farnaby, whom Gemma also spoke to, wrote Paddington 2. (Now in theaters.)

Writer/director/actor Cooper Raiff follows up his auspicious 2020 debut Sh*thouse with Cha Cha Real Smooth, which garnered plenty of fans when it debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Raiff stars as a somewhat listless recent college graduate who forms a friendship with a lonely woman (Dakata Johnson) and her autistic daughter (Vanessa Burghardt). KJ says the film is “marvelously crafted for every twenty-something who feels like they’re living with the constant fear that they have already peaked.” (In theaters June 17.)

Director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, who together were responsible for the landmark modern horror film Sinister, reteam with that movie’s star Ethan Hawke (and co-star James Ransone) for The Black Phone, a supremely creepy-looking movie arriving with some of the best horror buzz this side of Hereditary. “A cold-blooded horror experience,” raves SlasherReviews. “There are shots in this that are burned into my brain.” (In theaters June 24.)

Showman Baz Luhrmann returns to cinemas this month with Elvis. His maximalist celebration of the King elicited a wide range of reactions at Cannes, as Bazmark films tend to do, though most are unanimous on the performance of relative unknown Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), who follows in the footsteps of Kurt Russell, Dale Midkiff and Bruce Campbell in playing Elvis Presley. But this ain’t no straightforward biopic. “At least Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is about something,” writes Brian Formo. “That something is capitalism.” Maureen concurs: “It’s not a biopic so much as an operatic assessment of Elvis’s place in culture and a heartfelt attempt to understand how revolutionary he once was [as] an artist.” Luhrmann brings it home, says Max: “Imagine my surprise when I realize I’m getting choked up during the final minutes. Despite all the faults, it all just works.” (In theaters June 24.)

SS Rajamouli’s Telugu-language breakout RRR continues to dazzle audiences hungry for uplifting spectacle in holdover theatrical runs. Letterboxd members can’t get enough, so we got playwright Sunil Patel to interview Rajamouli for this equally spectacular feature where he talks about his joy at the film finding a Western audience, writing movies with his father, how he ramped up the emotion, and keeping all the animals safe. And while we’re talking about Indian cinema, be sure to check out Karthik’s list Indian Summer, a watch challenge designed to guide curious viewers into the wide range of movies from the sub-continent.

Some films have such titles that, if you casually refer to them in conversation, you have to stop and say “you know, the movie”. I mean, just try casually referring to F9 during a game of Battleship. Or the movie Battleship during a game of Battleship. Michael has helpfully compiled a bunch of the culprits into a handy list.

You may have heard that stalwart English character actor Rory Kinnear (son of the late, great Roy Kinnear, in case you weren’t aware), plays a variety of men in Alex Garland’s psychological horror Men, which is currently in theaters. Our contributor Isaac Feldberg spoke to the actor about the unique “role”. Meanwhile, Horrorville HQ has put together a list of Five Horror Films About Women’s Trauma to (Re)Watch Before You See Men.

Like many of the quarter-million-odd Letterboxd members to log Top Gun: Maverick in the past month, we were curious to learn how the young cast were trained to hold their lunches in while pulling eight Gs. The answer: second-generation aerial stunt designer Kevin LaRosa II, who jumped on the line with Kambole Campbell to discuss CineJets, A-Star helicopters, Phenom camera jets, Shotover gimbals and other nerdy aerial-cinematography details.

Summer is here, and you know what that means: time to watch cool, weird, old genre movies! Get on board with the Vinegar Summerdrome 2022, a summer-long watch challenge based around Vinegar Syndrome’s “insanely deep catalog of oddities”. God bless the people at Vinegar Syndrome, preserving cinematic culture one cool weird movie at a time.

TIL about Sigma Males.

Taika Waititi’s 2016 breakout movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople is pretty popular here on Letterboxd (an average 4.0 rating at time of press), but we were still surprised to find out that Toomy Nada had watched the film every day for a year. So we asked her all about the experience.

Look, we can’t all be winners, despite the majority of cinema suggesting that is the only path to happiness. Huckelberry Shelf has perceived a trend moving away from this thinking in modern independent cinema, and has created a cinema of losers list, collecting together movies that “revolve around losers, awkward freaky pathetic people struggling to carve themselves a niche in the world.” We can all relate.

Ninja Thyberg’s confronting porn-industry drama Pleasure is now in theaters, and the Swedish filmmaker spoke to Charles Bramesco for Journal about how she expanded her feature debut from a 2013 short, her views on other movies about the adult-film world, and the film that inspired her to become a director.

After Tweeting that her favorite genre was “horny nerd in a suit having the worst night of his life” along with images from 80s classics After Hours and Miracle Mile, Letterboxd member Steph Benchin collated all the resulting recommendations into this stellar list. 

Unmoved by rah-rah Memorial Day movie recommendations, VyceVictus made a list of films in which 21st-Century Military Veterans Become Armed Robbers, which Vyce claims “actually speak to our current reality while still being entertaining as f—k”. There’s a surprisingly large number of films that fit this rather specific description. Looks like the Hughes brothers’ Dead Presidents was more influential than we thought.

Reproductive rights are human rights.

It’s time for Dom’s Pick! Each month, Call Sheet editor Dominic Corry ends with a film for your watchlists. This month: Cast a Deadly Spell. The great Fred Ward’s recent passing inspired a rewatch of this “magic noir” set in a post-war Los Angeles where magic is commonplace. Ward is perfectly hard boiled as a private detective trying to track down an ancient tome. There’s a stacked supporting cast (Julianne Moore, Clancy Brown, David Warner), inventive practical effects and some suspiciously familiar gremlins. RIP Fred Ward.