Nick Schager

Roadside AttractionsKill’s title card doesn’t arrive until the film’s 45-minute mark, at which point this delirious Indian action affair goes from being conventionally violent to jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly, gasp-inducingly brutal. A no-holds-barred free-for-all that delivers exactly what it promises, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature has scant time for story and even less for character development. What it does boast, however, are brawls marked by the sort of viciousness that genre fans weaned on domestic (John Wick, Atomic Blonde) and foreign (The Villainess, Carter) bloodbaths have come to demand. Arriving in theaters on July 4 following its appearances at the Toronto, Sundance, and Tribeca Film Festivals, it’s a model midnight-movie beat-’em-up.Amrit (Lakshya, in his big-screen debut) and his best pal Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) are National Security Guard commandos and best friends,. After returning from their latest army mission, Amrit discovers that in his absence, his beloved girlfriend Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) has been forced by her father to accept another man’s marriage proposal. Upset by this news, Amrit attends the engagement party with the intention of running away with Tulika, but she balks at this plan. Far from dissuaded, Amrit subsequently tells Viresh that he’s not giving up on his and Tulika’s future because, “Bro, our love is much more powerful than her dad.” “What a line, Captain!” responds Viresh, undoubtedly because there’s nothing either of them likes more than starting each sentence with “bro.”Amrit is a manly man whose every shirtless pose, intense stare, and turned head is accompanied by an over-the-top musical cue. In the wake of his failed attempt to elope with Tulika, he boards the evening train that she and her family—including teenage sister Aahna (Adrija Sinha) and dad Baldeo Singh Thakur (Harsh Chhaya), who’s a wealthy business magnate—are taking to Delhi. Out of the watchful eyes of her clan, Amrit proposes to Tulika in a bathroom, and she accepts. This should, in theory, create some conflict considering that Tulika is now betrothed to two different beaus, but Kill ignores those complications. The later revelation that Baldeo never knew about Amrit even though he’s been dating Tulika for four years (!) proves a similar bit of nonsensicality that’s never adequately explained.Read more at The Daily Beast.

FacebookSocial media is both untrustworthy and corrosive, and while those facts may be obvious to anyone who spends time on X or Instagram, they’re nonetheless verified in stark fashion by TikTok Star Murders. Premiering on Peacock on June 25, this feature-length documentary details the ugly case of Ali Abulaban and his wife Ana, whose online image as a happy and fun-loving couple proved to be a terrible lie. An up-close-and-personal tragedy of fame, ego, and domestic abuse that’s energized by copious recordings made by its homicidal subject, it’s a 21st-century cautionary tale about the desire for fame and the platforms which make that dream seem so easily attainable.Raised in a strict Muslim household, Ali joined the United States Air Force and wound up stationed in Okinawa, Japan, where he met Ana. The two quickly hit it off, but their relationship was temporarily thwarted when Ali was unceremoniously discharged for getting into a brawl. Back living with his family in Bristow, Virginia, in 2015, Ali learned that Ana—who had relocated with her clan to her native Philippines—was pregnant with their child. By January 2017, Ali had secured Ana a visa to join him in Virginia, where they moved into a house and began a life that blossomed thanks to Ali’s growing online fanbase.Having aspired to be an actor, Ali started making short-form content for YouTube, Instagram, and ultimately TikTok, where he amassed a sizable following with comedy-sketch videos featuring spot-on impressions. His favorite (and most notable) character was Scarface’s Tony Montana, and as clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. Joni Johnston points out in TikTok Star Murders, the fact that he adored such a violent icon was a hint about his own true nature. Peacock’s documentary presents many of these viral clips, and though few of them are funny or original, they do illustrate his enthusiasm for the bite-size form, as well as his modest talent for mimicking A-listers like Al Pacino, Nicolas Cage, and Keanu Reeves.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Hector Amezcua/TNS via ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockSherri Papini was regarded by all who knew her as a “supermom” who went above and beyond for her two young children as well as her husband Keith. So when the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 34-year-old vanished in 2016 while on a jog not far from her Redding, California, home, her family and the community were rocked. It wasn’t long before Sherri’s disappearance became national news, and things only got stranger when, 22 days later, she was miraculously found, the apparent victim of brutal torture. The story she spun horrified her loved ones and captivated the nation. As Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini reveals, however, it was actually a tall tale that resulted in far more questions than answers.Hulu’s three-part docuseries (June 20) concerns a woman who seemingly had it all, and yet was clearly unhappy enough—for reasons that are open to debate—to risk everything via an unthinkably brazen stunt. Director Michael Beach Nichols’ docuseries benefits from the participation of virtually everyone close to this case (save for Sherri herself), and it suggests a number of hypotheses regarding why it happened in the first place. As multiple interviewees admit, Sherri’s true motives for her actions remain unknown, but that merely enhances the speculation-fueled mystery of this bizarre, headline-making saga.On Nov. 2, 2016, Sherri dropped her kids off at daycare and went for a routine run. When Keith arrived home from work later that day and didn’t find her or the children waiting for him, he became suspicious. He soon learned that his son and daughter were never picked up, and that no one had heard from Sherri. When he snooped around the nearby area, he discovered her cellphone and headphones (with a bit of her hair) on the ground near their mailbox. This implied something awful, and he reported it to Shasta County police officer Kyle Wallace, who took the lead on the ensuing investigation into her whereabouts.Read more at The Daily Beast.

ShudderMovies don’t come much more despairing than The Devil’s Bath. Premiering in theaters before its release June 28 on Shudder, the film is a period piece from Goodnight Mommy writers/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala that offers a harrowing view of the grim realities of women’s life in 18th-century rural Europea. A sorrowful saga about a young wife’s descent into desolation and derangement, this slow-burner of a horror drama offers few respites from its literal and figurative darkness. Nonetheless, it’s a fiery sermon of despondency and damnation, as well as a memorable nightmare of marriage, motherhood, and madness.In upper Austria in 1750, a woman plucks up her crying baby and walks him to the top of a waterfall. There, with a stern expression and little fanfare, she drops the tyke to its death, after which she crosses herself and visits the nearby prison to announce, “I’ve committed a crime.” For this murder, her toes and fingers are severed and her head is removed from her shoulders and placed in a cage to rest, forever, beside her decapitated body, which sits on a chair in a three-columned woodlands site as a reminder to all about the consequences of sin.Shortly thereafter, Agnes (Anja Plaschg) packages up her collection of dead bugs and, with her mother and brother’s assistance, drags a cart with a dowry (of a chicken) to her wedding to Wolf (David Scheid). Upon arriving at the festivities, Agnes surfs a crowd of well-wishers as Wolf tries to take her hand, and the strangeness of this custom is offset by the auspicious mood it conjures. That atmosphere is not to last, alas. Though Agnes believed that they’d be staying with Wolf’s mother Gänglin (Maria Hofstätter), he reveals to her that he’s purchased a nearby hillside house for them. Since it boasts space for a shrine and a sizable bedchamber, she gladly acquiesces to these circumstances (not that she has a choice). At a bonfire later that evening, she’s handed a severed finger by her brother as a gift of good luck for having a child—a gesture that’s countered by the sight of Wolf drunkenly coming on to a local man.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Sky UKJohn Johnson was a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University in 2009 when, while taking a class led by Anna Stubblefield—the director of the philosophy department, who was teaching in the American Studies Doctoral Program—he saw a movie about facilitated communication. Designed to help non-verbal mentally disabled men and women converse and express themselves, the technique involves having impaired people use keyboards or target boards to articulate what they can’t, all with the assistance of instructors who hold their arms or hands to compensate for their physical shakiness. The idea is that, with this revolutionary support, the mentally disabled can say what they really think, unhindered by their bodily limitations.This struck John as a potential course of action for his brother Derrick, who was born with severe cerebral palsy that rendered him unable to speak or walk without assistance, and he asked Anna about it. Since the nearest treatment facility was 250 miles away in Syracuse, New York, Anna—who had experience working with the disabled but was no expert in this practice—agreed to do some initial testing with Derrick on her own. “She was going to move mountains, and I accepted her at her word,” says Derrick’s mother, Daisy, in Tell Them You Love Me.Instead, what her family got was a nightmare that ended in a courtroom.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Apple TV+Distending their source material to egregious lengths with unnecessary exposition, superfluous additions, and ham-fisted “timeliness,” most long-form TV adaptations of popular films have severely underwhelmed. Consequently, it’s a welcome relief to report that Presumed Innocent, which premieres June 12, is the excellent exception to this most unfortunate of rules.Created and largely written by David E. Kelley (A Man in Full, Big Little Lies), and starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the role first played on the big-screen in 1990 by Harrison Ford, this eight-part version of Scott Turow’s 1987 bestseller is a thriller par excellence, this despite the fact that, per modern convention, it switches things up (some major, some minor), adds a few subplots, and updates its story for the 21st-century. Gripping from the start, it would earn the distinction of being “binge-able” if not for the fact that its episodes will premiere weekly on Apple TV+—although that release strategy simply means that it should be the television talk of the summer, which is fitting considering Turow’s novel has long been an ideal beach read.In present-day Chicago, deputy district attorney Rusty Sabich’s (Gyllenhaal) relaxing afternoon with wife Barbara (Ruth Negga) and kids Jaden (Chase Infiniti) and Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick) is interrupted by horrific news: his colleague Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) has been murdered. If that weren’t shocking enough, the scene is unbelievably grisly, as Carolyn was bludgeoned to death with a fire poker from her apartment and left to bleed out from her wounds on her living room floor, face down and hog-tied. This homicide throws Rusty into turmoil, and it does likewise for the rest of those in his office, including district attorney Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp), who’s running for re-election against Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenie). Tensions are already high between Raymond and Nico, and that goes double for Rusty and Nico’s right-hand protégé Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), and their explosive professional dynamics are thoroughly detonated by Carolyn’s demise.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Courtesy of Tribeca Film FestivalHorror movies are often dire warnings about the world and its volatile, unholy chaos, and A Desert is a terrifying cautionary tale about the dangers lurking in the vast wastelands—and beneath the placid surfaces and around the tattered edges—of modern America. Premiering this weekend in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival, the film is a clash of the civilized and the primal that’s additionally laced with a sly meta undercurrent about cinema’s relationship to the deviance it depicts, Joshua Erkman’s directorial debut trawls a landscape of the abandoned, the forgotten, and the malevolent things that grow in the dark and the wild. It’s a nightmare that burrows under one’s skin like a virus (or a curse), and it heralds its creator as a bracing new genre-filmmaking voice.Teasing its basic narrative particulars with the same patience that it bestows upon its monstrousness, A Desert focuses on Alex (Kai Lennox), who’s traveling alone through the empty desert, forsaken ghost towns, and empty abodes of Yucca, Arizona. With an old 8x10 large-format film camera, Alex is striving to revitalize his photography career by snapping pictures of derelict places that, as he eventually articulates, represent “a moment where the unforgiving power of nature is gradually reclaiming its topography from what man has built on it.” To do this, Alex is looking to “purposely get lost,” and much of the film’s early going involves the professional shutterbug driving aimlessly from one gone-to-seed locale after another, beginning with a closed movie theater where his camera stares silently at a giant blank screen—an image that will be duplicated, warped, and reconfigured throughout the ensuing story.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Paramount PicturesThere may still be debate about who, precisely, was in the Brat Pack (Ally Sheedy? Yes. Kiefer Sutherland? No), but there’s little argument about the seismic cultural impact of the informal group and its catchy moniker, which was first coined by David Blum’s 1985 New York cover story.For the world, the term “Brat Pack”—a cheeky riff on the Rat Pack—was a catch-all way to refer to the young actors who were taking Hollywood by storm. For those on-the-rise artists, however, the nickname was less a cutesy blessing than a demeaning curse. Four decades after it solidified their reputations and personas, Andrew McCarthy—one of the clique’s leading lights—revisits its legacy, and its effect on his own, with Brats, a feature-length documentary, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival ahead of its Hulu debut on June 13. The film chronicles the whirlwind phenomenon and, it turns out, the tricky process of looking back and learning to both accept the good and let go of the bad.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Warner Bros. PicturesThe Watchers is a case of like father, like daughter, in that Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut follows the same basic pattern as the work of her dad M. Night Shyamalan—namely, it starts strong and then slowly falls apart under the weight of its obligations to clarify its baffling scenario. An adaptation of A. M. Shine’s 2022 novel, the filmmaker’s maiden feature not only suggests a raft of tantalizing early mysteries but establishes a variety of motifs that lend it an intriguing meta texture. By its conclusion, however, it resorts to the type of excessive and clumsy exposition that decimates plausibility and suspense.As she demonstrated during her tenure on her father’s superb Apple TV+ series Servant, Shyamalan is an expert mood-setter. She puts those skills to excellent use—generating unease through canny framing and sharp sound cues—at the outset of The Watchers, which hits theaters June 7. In a prologue, a man flees through dark, misty woodlands as narration from Mina (Dakota Fanning) reveals that this Irish forest “draws in lost souls” who never escape its clutches. This individual’s grisly fate at the hands of growling unseen beasts proves that point, and after he’s dispatched, the film segues to Galway, where Mina is working at a pet store. When her boss assigns her to transport a yellow parrot to a zoo near Belfast, Mina readily agrees, although she doesn’t depart the city until spending that evening at a bar flirting with men while wearing a dark wig and assuming a phony identity.Between that pastime, various close-ups of Mina’s eyes and shots of her staring at herself in the mirror, and her comment to her avian pal, “Don’t look at me like that,” The Watchers conveys that Mina doesn’t want to be seen. A message from a sister whose voice sounds identical to her own—and who’s upset that Mina is MIA from the memorial for their mother, who died 15 years ago to the day—reinforces the notion that she’s hiding from everyone, including herself. These undercurrents all become exceedingly relevant once Mina’s GPS guides her into the previously seen forest, her cell phone and radio go on the fritz (flashing strange runes before shutting off), and her car dies.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Sony PicturesGiven the critical and commercial success of 2020’s Bad Boys for Life—a long-delayed third buddy comedy that became the last pre-pandemic blockbuster—as well as Will Smith’s continuing need for image rehabilitation following The Slap Heard ’Round the World, it was inevitable that the A-lister and his favorite co-star Martin Lawrence would reunite for more riding and dying as Miami’s guns-a-blazin’ cops.In fact, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, in theaters June 7, is also unsurprising in every other way, from its profane bickering and chaotic action to directors Adil & Bilall’s enduring mimicry of original series director Michael Bay, whose over-the-top macho stylization remains sorely missed. Even a late meta joke about Smith’s Oscar scandal proves a predictable bit of self-consciousness and does less to enliven the proceedings than merely fulfill expectations.That wink-wink gag proves to be a self-aggrandizing inversion of Smith’s Academy Award meltdown, with his detective Mike Lowrey overcoming his unmanly panic attacks via some open-handed smacks to the face courtesy of partner Marcus Burnett (Lawrence). The slaps, you see, restore Mike’s inherent virility and confidence, and while recasting the incident in this way is pure, unadulterated ridiculousness on the star’s part, it’s no less absurd than an early wedding scene during which Mike’s bride Christine (Melanie Liburd) recites vows that praise her new spouse for his wealth, cool, and banging nude body. Read more at The Daily Beast.