Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.
Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.
SEE IT: ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ (In theaters)
If you like your Hollywood mega-sequels with a twist, try this one on for size.
Terminator: Dark Fate is the now (count ’em) fourth attempt to reboot James Cameron’s time-traveling grand-daddy of sci-fi action cinema after 2003’s generic Rise of the Machines, 2009’s grueling Salvation, and 2017’s calamitous Genisys, a truly misbegotten set of films that somehow got more unwatchable as they went along.
Instead of keeping with tradition by being absolutely terrible, Terminator: Dark Fate is something quite astounding: a worthy heir to Cameron’s first two films, finding the same balance of action spectacle, wry humor, and human heart that those movies nailed now more than 20 years ago. It’s the best Terminator since—fleet, fun, and thrilling. I’ll even let you in on the secret ingredient: James Cameron.
Producing while on loan from Pandora, Cameron rolled up his sleeves and reportedly went to war in the editing room for around six months to salvage the best-possible version of a rough cut by Dark Fate‘s actual helmer, Tim Miller (Deadpool). Here’s one instance where fans won’t be sniffing around for a director’s cut. That’s not to minimize Miller’s accomplishments as a conductor of high-octane action. He stages bravura sequences all across Dark Fate, from an early-on breakneck chase through Mexico City’s factories and roads (metal crunching against asphalt in a tasty hat-tip to this franchise’s industrialization-anxiety themes), to a climactic brawl inside a hydroelectric dam.
But the story’s pure Cameron, and where this sequel soars. After T2, Skynet never launched. Robopocalypse averted, right? Unfortunately, people being as they are, another AI was built for cyberwarfare, only to turn against and wipe out mankind in a series of targeted nuke and EMP strikes. The plucky human survivors (you’ve heard this one before) have found ways to fight back, both with time-travel technology and high-tech surgeries that “augment” human soldiers with Terminator capabilities.
Sent back in time, two warriors fall from the sky in Mexico City, looking for young Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who will one day play a key role in this new dystopia. Grace (Mackenzie Davis) is an augment, bent on protecting Dani from the other traveler, a REV-9 (Diego Luna), who’s 100% Terminator and lethally eager to prove it. The REV-9 comes with a few special features; it can mimic the form of any human it touches, separate into two fully functional death-dealers at will, and rebuild itself from a pile of oily sludge within minutes. In short, it’s real bad news.
Dark Fate plays fast and loose with franchise mythology in a way that recognizes the insanity of feeling beholden to continuity in a series this directly about the need to alter some timelines to prevent others. But it’s true to what came before in a smarter way. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is still kicking, a remnant from the Skynet timeline that never happened, as is the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who’s now enjoying, without spoilers, a cheery retirement of sorts in Texas.
After a crackerjack first act that gets all these gears turning, Grace and Dani intersect with Sarah and the T-800 (now known as Carl), and the four band together against the near-unstoppable adversary on their trail. Hamilton’s Sarah is tough-as-nails while making no secret of how time has left its mark on her. Grace, meanwhile, is wildly athletic and, as Davis plays her, remarkably charming. In between them, Reyes’ Dani exhibits a quiet, transformative strength all her own.
It’s an admitted thrill, especially before we meet the scene-stealing wonder that is Carl, to watch a Terminator film powered by three women this distinctly capable. That’s not the only front on which Dark Fate is surprisingly with the times. (Just count how many border-patrol agents make it out alive during a smartly staged escape from a U.S. immigration detention facility.)
Dark Fate systemically knows how to move Terminator forward while honoring its history. It’s slick, suprisingly coherent blockbuster filmmaking, full of substantive and cleanly shot action that keeps upping the ante mostly without losing sight of these characters. Even more excitingly, it gives Hamilton and Schwarzenegger real purpose, a chance to showcase the expected dramatic chops and welcome comedic ones too. If anyone has good reason to doubt franchise resets, it’s Terminator fans. This one, unexpectedly, suggests a bright future.
STREAM IT: ‘American Son’ (Netflix)
Plenty of thoughtful dramas have been made in recent years about the uniquely American epidemic that is state-sanctioned, police-perpetrated violence against black men. Some, like last year’s Blindspotting, The Hate U Give, and Monsters and Men, have explored the lived trauma that comes from being a person of color in our racialized society by emphasizing the importance of speaking one’s terrible truth—and the catharsis of being heard.
In the closing moments of American Son, no such voice rings out. There’s just a scream that cuts the soul, and a strangled gasp of a last line. In a chamber piece composed entirely of far-ranging discussions on unconscious bias, systemic racism, and police brutality, that speaks powerfully as well.
Set across one long, stormy night in a Miami police station, American Son centers on a mother, Kendra (Kerry Washington), waiting to learn the fate of her 18-year-old son, Jamal, who encountered police officers during a non-specific “incident” hours earlier. When we meet Kendra, she’s already entered panic mode, almost doubled over from terror and taking swipes at anyone in reach—that’d be the neophyte night-shift officer (Jeremy Jordan), blundering through a minefield of racial microaggressions, and her estranged husband (Steven Pasquale), who’s white and often fares just as poorly. Kendra’s fractious and confrontational; in her hyper-anxious state, every clumsily chosen word lands on her like a blow, every moment of inaction a stalling tactic.
Originally a stage play, translated to the screen by its original players (including director Kenny Leon and writer Christopher Demos-Brown), American Son draws its central tension not from what happened to Jamal, (whom indeed we never meet) but from his parents’ struggle not to assume the worst.
American Son isn’t adapted for the screen so much as captured on camera, in ways that work to its detriment. Blocked like a stage play, written with the unnatural polish of one, and acted by performers whose emotions are scaled to reach an ampitheater, it can feel histrionic. Washington, especially, is at 11 right away and stays there for the entire 90 minutes. This must have been an exhausting performance to deliver; it’s more the writing’s fault than Washington’s that she has nowhere to take it.
But American Son is still a worthy conversation-starter, a slightly behind-the-times but nevertheless compelling comment on race relations. A Netflix “event,” American Son will reach millions who’d likely never have seen the play live. In that sense, the movie signals the promise of our streaming sphere. Viewers will leave the crudely detonated grenade that is American Son feeling a mixture of things, positive and negative; if they sit down to debate them in their living rooms, the film will have done not only its job but a real public service.
SKIP IT: ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ (In theaters)
Why Edward Norton had to shift his adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s terrific 1990s-set crime novel backward in time to 1957 isn’t entirely clear, even after watching it, unless his motivations were of a purely aesthetic (read: egocentric) variety. A 20-years-in-the-works passion project for its multi-hyphenate star (who also wrote, directed, and produced), Motherless Brooklyn impressively recreates ’50s post-war New York, from its gray, late-autumn hues and looming yet unfinished architecture to the all-important hats worn by its period-appropriate array of detectives, dames, and double-crossers.
But to what end? The period detail is so meticulous it feels fussy, not like sepia-toned nostalgia but suffocating amber, leaving the characters to wriggle around like bugs inside its artifices and not act very much like characters at all.
The hero is Lionel Essrog (Norton), is a Tourette’s-afflicted gumshoe on a crusade to figure out why his employer (Bruce Willis) was gunned down in the street; this quest, which sends him all over the city, eventually leads him into its most secretive halls of power. The film’s biggest influence is Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (especially given how closely it hews to that noir classic in its twists regarding parentage and focus on institutional rot), but Lionel’s not a natural fit within that jazzy, swirling-smoke dreamland. He can’t even listen to jazz—all the improvised notes drive his head crazy.
Norton throws himself into this role in a way he expects you to find admirable, twitching and shouting all manner of knotted obscenities in defiance of the cooler-headed, empathetic guy undeneath and flashing looks of weary apology as he does so. But it’s the worst kind of Oscar-baiting, drawing attention to itself when it should be serving the story. Out of either vanity or empty-headedness, Norton sees fit to simply show you Lionel’s condition, then show you again, then add one more spasm for good measure; this is a performance that has been bold-typed, italicized, then stylized in some godawful font, probably Wide Latin. Motherless Brooklyn is 144 minutes long and makes The Irishman feel fleet.
“I have threads in my head,” Lionel says throughout a film that itself picks at far too many. This is a dense text, opening with a (weirdly unattributed) Shakespeare quote, primarily about how the corruption and greed of New York power brokers shaped the city’s industrial future while paving over its poor and working-class. It is also a murder mystery, a romance, a commentary on insitutional racism and dictatorship, an exploration of mental illness with major pitstops at a jazz lounge. It is some of these things more convincingly than it is others, but it is ultimately about nothing more than Norton’s vision of himself as a visionary, so unfailingly determined to make this movie that, through sheer force of ego, he has done so, and subsumed it.
The Best of the Rest:
For a certain subsection of the movie-going general public, Timothée Chalamet is the defining heartthrob of our times, a slender, smoldering young star with doe eyes, tousled chestnut hair, and a jawline that could cut diamonds. He’s the arthouse’s matinee idol, taken less to Hollywood productions than dramatically hefty roles in indie fare like Call Me By Your Name and Beautiful Boy, where his characters don’t just reveal an inner vulnerability but become it entirely.
In The King (streaming on Netflix), he faces a challenge that’s felled many an actor before him: acting through heavy armor and ermine pelts to find the human emotion beneath 1400s palace intrigue. In Animal Kingdom director David Michôd’s gritty take on Shakespeare (which eschews the bard’s original dialogue in favor of something closer to Game of Thrones), Chalamet plays a young Henry V, navigating the royal snake pit with a trusted advisor (Joel Edgerton) in his corner and plenty of more dubiously allied players (Robert Pattinson, Sean Harris, and Ben Mendelsohn) vying for forms of power. When the film arrives on Netflix Friday (after a brief stint in theaters), viewers will decide for themselves whether Chalamet can carry such a hefty hunk of period theater atop his wiry shoulders.
For those in search of Keanu-specific thrills this weekend, Netflix has also made all three Matrix films available for streaming. Other newly available titles include Rosemary’s Baby, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Grease, and Michael Douglas-starring puzzle-box The Game.
Ahead of next year’s remake, Hulu’s adding The Ring (2002), one of the rare American remakes of a foreign horror film that doesn’t butcher the source material; Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride will also be available on the platform to bridge that all-important transition from Halloween to the holidays, and Chinatown and Fatal Attraction are both coming to Hulu.
Amazon Prime, meanwhile, is dropping season two of Jack Ryan, its hit action saga about the Tom Clancy-created CIA analyst (John Krasinski). In this sophomore outing, our hero is caught up in an action-packed mission to Venezeula, where a dark conspiracy involving nuclear weapons threatens to bring the country to the brink of collapse. Ludicrous, frankly irresponsible propaganda that could have been shadow-produced by John Bolton? You ‘betcha. It’s also well-mounted action-pulp cinema and, taken as a genre throwback, fairly thrilling. But really, this is Apple’s world; we’re just streaming in it. Friday marks the launch of Apple TV+, the tech giant’s mighty push into the subscription-streamer game – and the first of the major Netflix competitors (among them Disney+, HBO Max, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock) to hit market. In this early stage, Apple TV+ bears the mark of a company out of its comfort zone; its freshman slate – The Morning Show, See, For All Mankind, Dickinson, and The Elephant Queen—is largely pedestrian and add up to less than the sum of their ultra-expensive parts. Our full coverage is here.
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