Table of Contents
Weapons
Barbarian, Zach Cregger’s twist-filled horror film about the world’s worst Airbnb, was a commercial and critical hit in 2022, and now the writer-director returns with a film which, he says, is “more ambitious in almost every way”. The Twilight Zone-worthy premise is that 17 children from the same class all wake up at the same moment, walk out of their houses and disappear into the night, never to be seen again. The children’s parents (Josh Brolin, among others) are desperate for answers, and their teacher (Julia Garner) is under suspicion. But that, says Cregger, is just the start of the story. Even more intriguingly, he says that he was influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson’s multi-stranded ensemble drama, Magnolia. “I love that movie,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I love that kind of bold scale. It gave me permission when I was writing this to shoot for the stars and make it an epic. I wanted a horror epic, and so I tried to do that.”
Released on 8 August in cinemas internationally
DreamWorks Animation LLCThe Bad Guys 2
The Bad Guys was a different kind of DreamWorks cartoon – a stylish heist caper in the Ocean’s Eleven mould, except that the criminals just happened to be talking animals. Adapted from Aaron Blabey’s graphic novels, the film featured Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson) and Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos), a gang of wisecracking criminals who got tired of being stereotyped as scary predators. In the sequel, they’re still struggling to be accepted as upstanding members of the community, and things get trickier when they’re blackmailed into teaming up with another gang of crooked animals: The Bad Girls. The director, Pierre Perifel, says that the sequel makes the jump from heist film to all-action blockbuster. “We’re big fans of Mission: Impossible, and of big action films in particular, and we wanted to dabble and play with that genre,” Perifel told Collider. “We’re not doing Mission: Impossible, we’re doing The Bad Guys, but it has those tropes.”
Released on 1 August in cinemas internationally