2019 Summer Movies: Here’s What’s Coming Soon to Theaters
Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change.
May 29
ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE Ali Wong plays a Los Angeles chef whose return to her native San Francisco occasions a reconnection (and a romance?) with an old friend (Randall Park).
May 31
DOMINO Brian De Palma’s first feature since “Passion” (2013) is a European production with a rocky history; in an interview with Le Figaro, he distanced himself from the project. Still, teeming with the director’s signature visual tricks and homages to Hitchcock, the film is recognizably his. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Carice van Houten play Copenhagen police searching for the killer of one of their own. Guy Pearce plays a C.I.A. operative.
GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS Five years after the last Hollywood movie in which he stomped through town, the giant lizard returns for a monster mash-up. Now he’s more or less on humanity’s side, at least compared with Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah. Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown and Ken Watanabe are among the cast members who risk being squashed.
MA Important safety tip, teenagers: When you ask an adult to buy you alcohol, make sure you’re not cadging off someone who will develop a dangerous obsession with you and your cohorts. Octavia Spencer fills that role in this thriller from Tate Taylor (“The Help”); the cast includes Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis and Luke Evans.
ROCKETMAN Dexter Fletcher, who stepped in to finish filming “Bohemian Rhapsody” after Bryan Singer was fired (and yes, The Washington Post reported, Fletcher was responsible for the scene derided for its terrible editing), now directs a musical biopic he can fully call his own, with Taron Egerton as Elton John.
June 7
THE BLACK GODFATHER Often called the “godfather of black music,” the industry executive Clarence Avant — who played an important role in the careers of Bill Withers and Quincy Jones, among many others — is profiled in this documentary.
DARK PHOENIX Just when you thought the comic-movie marathons were over, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) goes to the dark side in a film that is being promoted as the capstone to two decades of X-Men movies. James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain co-star. Simon Kinberg directed.
FRAMING JOHN DELOREAN In one of two films about John DeLorean this summer, Alec Baldwin plays the automobile executive who rose through General Motors and gave us the “Back to the Future” car — and later was acquitted of cocaine charges in a high-profile case. Directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, it’s a meta-documentary. Baldwin reflects on playing the part, and there are interviews with DeLorean’s family members.
THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO A major critical success at Sundance, the writer-director Joe Talbot’s debut feature uses a loose, poetic narrative to explore the effect of displacement in San Francisco, through the story of one man (Jimmie Fails, playing a version of himself) trying to take back the Victorian-style home he associates with his grandfather.
LATE NIGHT In this Sundance crowd-pleaser, Mindy Kaling breaks into the all-male writer’s room of a struggling late-night show, whose host (Emma Thompson) is “Devil Wears Prada”-level demanding. She may be just what’s needed to turn the ratings around. Kaling wrote the screenplay; Nisha Ganatra directed.
LETO The director Kirill Serebrennikov worked on the editing of this black-and-white rock-band saga, set in 1980s Russia, while he was under house arrest. (He was freed last month after serving more than 18 months.) The charges of financial fraud against him were widely seen as being politically motivated.
PAVAROTTI Ron Howard, opera fan? He directed this documentary about the legendary tenor, with his singing mixed for Dolby Atmos.
THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS 2 Just how big a paycheck did the suits have to cut Harrison Ford to lend his voice to a farm dog named Rooster? Patton Oswalt takes over for Louis C.K. as the terrier Max, while Jenny Slate and Kevin Hart return as a Pomeranian and a bunny.
June 12
ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE Scorsese, who already made one Dylan film, “No Direction Home” (or two Dylan films, if you count the singer’s appearance toward the end of “The Last Waltz”), directs this documentary and concert film centered on Dylan’s mid-’70s tour.
June 14
AMERICAN WOMAN Sienna Miller plays a mother whose teenage daughter goes missing — leaving her to raise a grandson as she grapples with uncertainty and suspicion. Jake Scott directed. Christina Hendricks and Aaron Paul co-star.
THE DEAD DON’T DIE If anyone gets to ignore what should be a moratorium on zombie movies — is there any horror subgenre more overexposed? — it’s Jim Jarmusch, whose genius for deadpan comedy is perfectly suited to the undead. Bill Murray, Adam Driver,
Selena Gomez and Tilda Swinton are among the living in the very large cast.
MEN IN BLACK: INTERNATIONAL This time it’s Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth who suit up as wisecracking agents who thwart threats from nasty aliens (and prevent knowledge of the good ones). F. Gary Gray directs. Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson have also been tailored for the occasion.
OUR TIME (NUESTRO TIEMPO) This mesmerizing overshare from the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas (“Post Tenebras Lux”) stars the director and Natalia López as a couple whose open marriage is tested when she has an affair with a horse trainer. Reygadas and López are married in real life, lending a voyeuristic pull to the movie.
SHAFT Who are the cats that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about? (Shaft!) In this movie, there are three: Samuel L. Jackson (returning from John Singleton’s 2000 reboot), Jessie T. Usher as his son and Richard Roundtree (returning, of course, from, among other things, the Gordon Parks original and several other iterations) as Grandpa Shaft. Regina Hall co-stars.
June 19
THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY Drawing connections in a way that might have pleased Chris Marker, the master of the essay film, Petra Costa directs this highly personal look at recent political history in Brazil. She uses the lenses of both her family (her parents lived underground during part of the dictatorship that ended in 1985) and agreeably wonky analysis (of, for instance, the body language at the inauguration of former President Dilma Rousseff).
June 21
CHILD’S PLAY This killer-doll franchise is an excellent demonstration of the life cycle of a commercial movie property: Follow a hit original (1988) with two sequels (“Child’s Play 2” and “Child’s Play 3”) and several self-parodies (“Bride of Chucky,” “Seed of Chucky” and straight-to-video follow-ups) — then reboot. Aubrey Plaza and Gabriel Bateman star in this “contemporary reimagining,” with Mark Hamill as the voice of Chucky.
THE QUIET ONE That’s not the quiet Beatle, but the quiet Rolling Stone, Bill Wyman, who is profiled in this career-spanning documentary.
WILD ROSE The Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who earned a reputation as a face to watch in “Beast,” stars as a Glaswegian musician who travels to Nashville to make it as a country singer.
TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM The Nobel-winning author reflects on her novels at length in this profile from the documentarian Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a friend of hers.
TOY STORY 4 The latest installment — the first in five years — introduces a spork that becomes known as Forky (voiced by Tony Hale) after Bonnie transforms him into a toy through arts and crafts. The spork is down on himself; Woody (Tom Hanks) must convince him that he has purpose.
June 26
THE CHAMBERMAID This first feature from the Mexican filmmaker Lila Avilés observes the routines of a hotel maid (Gabriela Cartol). “Our sense of exploitation and alienation is palpable, but the moments of beauty, tenderness and freedom that punctuate the drudgery provide flickers of humanity that feel almost miraculous,” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times when the film played at New Directors/New Films earlier this year.
June 28
ANNABELLE COMES HOME To some of us, Annabelle never really left. The latest entry in the “Conjuring” universe shows us when Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) added the killer doll to their private collection.
MAIDEN Members of an all-female crew who broke ground in the Whitbread Round the World Race, a sailing competition, remember the tests and triumphs of their 1989-90 journey.
YESTERDAY Himesh Patel stars as a musician who awakes to a world in which no one else has heard of the Beatles. Not a bad cover artist, he seeks to capitalize on their hits. Danny Boyle directed from a screenplay by Richard Curtis (“Love Actually”). Lily James, Ed Sheeran and Kate McKinnon co-star.
July 3
MIDSOMMAR Ari Aster, the hot-out-of-Sundance director behind last year’s “Hereditary,” is already back. This horror film stars Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor as a couple on the rocks who attend an eerie Swedish summer festival — an event that appears to have some “Wicker Man” vibes.
July 12
CRAWL Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper get trapped in a crawlspace during a Florida hurricane. And you know what’s also native to Florida and crawls: alligators. Alexandre Aja directed.
THE FAREWELL Lulu Wang’s bittersweet, semi-autobiographical feature was a runaway success with critics at Sundance. Awkwafina, who delivers much of her performance in Mandarin, plays a young woman who travels with her family to say goodbye to her terminally ill grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) — though they say they’re there to attend a wedding, because they can’t tell the grandmother she is dying.
STUBER Kumail Nanjiani plays an Uber driver whose latest fare is a Los Angeles cop (Dave Bautista) insistent that he be driven around while he pursues a killer. Why the cop doesn’t have his own car is, let’s hope, answered amid the wisecracks and explosions. Michael Dowse (“Goon”) directed.
SWORD OF TRUST After inheriting a sword with a dubious Civil War history from her grandfather, a woman (Jillian Bell) and her friend (Michaela Watkins) try selling it to a pawnshop owner (Marc Maron), who in turn tries his luck on the black market. Lynn Shelton (“Humpday”) directed.
21 BRIDGES Chadwick Boseman plays a New York City police detective searching for the killers of eight of his colleagues. To ensnare them — and, inadvertently, several million other people — they close all the bridges that connect to Manhattan. (Even under these circumstances, nobody wants to swim the Hudson.) Sienna Miller and Stephan James co-star.
July 19
THE LION KING It’s the ciiiircle of life! The 1994 animated feature lives again, reanimated in a more photorealistic style for the tastes of 2019. Jon Favreau directed, with Donald Glover providing the voice for Simba, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter for Nala and Chiwetel Ejiofor for Scar.
July 24
THE GREAT HACK Jehane Noujaim (“Control Room”) and Karim Amer directed this exposé of the secrets of online data collection. Substantially focused on Cambridge Analytica, it is guaranteed to make you want to move to the woods and never use the web again.
July 26
FOR SAMA Waad al-Kateab, who directed this documentary with Edward Watts, frames the film as a letter to her daughter, who was born in 2016 in a rebel-held section of Aleppo, Syria. The movie is one of the best documentaries made about the devastation there, jumping back and forth in time to show the war’s impact on al-Kateab’s family and her city, where her husband works as a doctor at what becomes the last hospital.
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD The latest film from Quentin Tarantino is said to be a love letter to Hollywood circa 1969 as seen by an aging actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt). The large cast includes Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate.
SKIN Having just won a live-action-short Oscar for a similarly themed film of the same title, Guy Nattiv directs this movie about a white supremacist (Jamie Bell) who has a change of heart. Danielle Macdonald (“Patti Cake$”) and Vera Farmiga co-star.
Aug. 2
FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW This offshoot of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise finds the rivals Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Shaw (Jason Statham) putting their cue-ball heads together to thwart a genetically enhanced soldier (Idris Elba). Vanessa Kirby plays Shaw’s sister.
LA FLOR Lasting more than 13 hours, the Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s movie seems like a safe bet to be the longest film released this year; it is also one of the most strangely structured. The director explains at the outset that several of the film’s tales lack endings, and the final one has no beginning. Those who’ve taken the plunge at festivals say it’s worth it.
LUCE This pressure-cooked drama from the director Julius Onah — adapted from a play staged at Lincoln Center in 2013 — is theatrical in the best sense. A class project by the title character, (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a model student adopted after a traumatic early childhood in Eritrea, raises the suspicions of a teacher (Octavia Spencer) and puts her in investigative mode. As the movie explores the consequences of what she learns, nothing is as clear-cut as it seems. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play Luce’s parents.
THE NIGHTINGALE The Australian director Jennifer Kent follows her much-loved horror film “The Babadook” with this deeply upsetting outback western. Set in the 19th century, when Britain administered its penal-colony system in Australia, it stars Aisling Franciosi as an Irish convict who, having been violently wronged by the lieutenant (Sam Claflin) responsible for her release, seeks vengeance, aided by an aboriginal tracker (Baykali Ganambarr).
Aug. 9
THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN Kevin Costner has never been great at accents (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “Thirteen Days”), but it’s pretty hard to screw up being the voice of a dog, which he is in this adaptation of Garth Stein’s novel. Milo Ventimiglia plays the dog’s human companion.
BRIAN BANKS Banks was a high school football star convicted of rape in 2002. In 2012, after assistance from the California Innocence Project, he was exonerated and his conviction was overturned. This dramatized feature stars Aldis Hodge as Banks.
DORA AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD Dora the Explorer (Isabela Moner) goes live-action. Her parents (Eva Longoria and Michael Peña) send her away from the jungle and into to the wilds of high school against her will — but she soon has to rescue them. A city of gold is somehow involved.
THE KITCHEN “Kitchen” as in “Hell’s,” that is. It’s another DC comic adaptation — but perhaps not the one you expected. Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss play mobster housewives who take care of business after their husbands go to the slammer. Andrea Berloff directed.
ONE CHILD NATION The winner of the top American documentary prize at this year’s Sundance festival, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s film looks at the legacy of China’s one-child policy. Wang, who was raised in China but now lives in the United States, examines how her perceptions of the policy have changed over time, from an upbringing saturated with propaganda promoting it to her current perceptions of it as a mother.
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK Alvin Schwartz’s incredibly creepy kid-lit anthology books make the leap to the big screen, with Guillermo del Toro among the producers. The conceit is that a group of children in 1968 stumble on a book of, well, scary stories, that come to life.
Aug. 14
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT A British teenager (Viveik Kalra) raised by traditional Pakistani parents becomes a Bruce Springsteen superfan in late-Thatcher-era Britain. Inspired by the British journalist Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir “Greetings from Bury Park,” this Sundance-approved crowd-pleaser doesn’t skimp on songs. Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Beckham”) directed.
Aug. 16
AQUARELA A frozen lake surface, waterfalls, floods: The experimental filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky sees drama in the wonders of water. And this documentary finds a novel use for high-frame-rate projection. (This film is being shown at 48 frames per second instead of the traditional 24.)
GOOD BOYS Or “Superbad,” the elementary school years. Jacob Tremblay, Brady Noon and Keith L. Williams star as the kids, who get into trouble after stealing Tremblay’s dad’s drone and then even deeper trouble — drugs, police — trying to replace it.
WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE? After embedding with drug addicts and a paramilitary group in “The Other Side,” the documentarian Roberto Minervini offers a very different look at life in Louisiana with this portrait of two half brothers, a bar owner, the New Black Panther Party and the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. Their stories highlight racial tensions and changing times in the city.
WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE Reviewing Maria Semple’s novel in The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised the book’s mixed-media construction. The story, she wrote, is told through “emails, letters, F.B.I. documents, correspondence with a psychiatrist and even an emergency-room bill.” How that will translate to the screen is an open question, but Richard Linklater is the guy who made “Fast Food Nation” into a movie. Cate Blanchett plays a Seattle woman who goes missing.
Aug. 23
ANGEL HAS FALLEN Having already rescued a president twice — first in “Olympus Has Fallen,” then in “London Has Fallen” — Gerard Butler’s Secret Service agent is now framed for an attempted presidential assassination.
BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON Setting a self-improvement goal, Brittany (Jillian Bell), who at first can barely run a mile, pushes herself to run 26. The playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo wrote and directed.
DRIVEN Didn’t get enough John DeLorean with the self-reflexive documentary “Framing John DeLorean” (in June)? Here’s a dramatized feature, with Lee Pace as the auto magnate and Jason Sudeikis as a friend of his — an F.B.I. informant.
MS. PURPLE A brother (Teddy Lee) and sister (Tiffany Chu) in Los Angeles’s Koreatown settle their differences while caring for their dying father. Justin Chon (the Los Angeles riots film “Gook”) directed.
OFFICIAL SECRETS Keira Knightley plays the British government linguist Katharine Gun, who leaked a top-secret email to The London Observer. The message revealed a request from the United States National Security Agency for assistance in bugging United Nations diplomats during the debate over the Iraq war. Ralph Fiennes plays a defense lawyer for Gun. Gavin Hood directed.
Compiled with the assistance of Sara Aridi.
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