Arun Venugopal: It's The Takeaway. I'm Arun Venugopal in for Melissa Harris-Perry this week. MHP is back next week. As we enter some of the hottest weeks of summer, it's a great time to head to your local movie theater. Just hope that the AC is working. So far, there are more audience members who's returning to theaters this year than last, but numbers are still down from pre-pandemic figures. What's bringing people to the multiplexes, nothing especially new. Once again, it's all about the sequels. There are the mayhem-inducing dinosaurs of Jurassic World Dominion.

Owen Grady: Don't move.

Arun: Those heroic Avengers, including Dr. Strange. This weekend's number one movie, Thor: Love and Thunder.

Thor: This end here and now.

Arun: And some guy named Tom Cruise.

Captain Maverick Mitchell: Good morning, aviators. This is your captain speaking. Welcome to basic fighter maneuvers.

Arun: But which releases are actually worth checking out this summer. Let's turn now to Rafer Guzman, film critic from Newsday. Rafer, great to have you here.

Rafer Guzman: Hey, Arun. How are you?

Arun: Great. Also, with us is Alison Willmore, film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture. Alison, thanks for being here, too.

Alison: Oh, thank you for having me.

Arun: Alison, let's start with you, and with this weekend's number one movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, what'd you think?

Alison: It wasn't my favorite Marvel movie, but I have to confess that the recent run of phase four Marvel movies have left me feeling a little lost in terms of where everything is headed.

Arun: Totally.

Alison: It's Taika Waititi, he is good with a joke and good with doing it this irreverent particularly unusual for Marvel type of humor. It was nice to see some of that again on screen after in the tradition of Thor: Ragnarok, his last movie.

Arun: Yes. Rafer, feelings?

Rafer: Yes. I was a huge fan actually of Thor: Ragnarok. It's been funny to watch the Thor franchise rise and fall. I think it's really been one of the lesser-loved franchises in Marvel. I feel like it was really in dire straits when Taika Waititi took it over for Ragnarok, and really gave the franchise shot in the arm. It was really funny and zany, and surreal, and self-effacing. I just have to say the magic wasn't there for this new one.

For me, I just felt like the Guns N' Roses soundtrack drove me nuts. [laughs] Things like that I couldn't abide it, but when I say that the Thor franchises risen and fallen, not at the box office, it's been going strong and this one's done great.

Arun: Yes. Your first pick, Rafer, is a much smaller film called The Duke based on a real story about an art heist in the UK. What'd you like about it?

Rafer: First of all, the first thing to like is it's got Jim Broadbent in it as a guy named Kempton Bunton, a real guy living in a small town in England in the early '60s. He's one of these guys who likes to take on a cause and make himself a pain in the butt to people. His cause in this movie is that he doesn't think there should be a television tax. By the way, who knew that there used to be a television tax in England, but there was. Somehow bear with me, he connects this television tax to stealing a Goya painting from the British Museum.

He does it so well that the police think that the place has been robbed by a group of international art thieves. They don't know that it's just actually sitting in this guy's closet about 20 miles away, but it's this very odd, little true story that I certainly have never known about. A great cast, Helen Mirren plays his wife, very charming, very funny, very cute, like just a real antithesis, I think, to a lot of the big splashy blockbusters that we've been seeing all this year. I thought had a really sweet, funny little heart to it, and I really enjoyed it.

Arun: Great. I love heist movies and I love Goya. I'm definitely going to see that. Alison, the new Elvis movie has been divisive. You called it fascinating, but you said it's not a great movie. Tell us a little more.

Alison: I would say it's not a great movie about Elvis necessarily. If you want a really completist traditional biopic that runs through all of the nitty-gritty of his life or something that actually engages with the idea of Elvis as someone who took a lot of ideas musically from Black musicians and then succeeded with them in ways that those Black musicians were not able to, this is not the movie that does anything like that, but I will say it is very much a Baz Luhrmann movie. It is just so maximalist. It is so excessive. It only deals with the parts of Elvis's life that interest Baz Luhrmann.

That aspect, I think, is a lot of fun. He is really good at showing Elvis as this performer who was magnetic and also just causing all of these sexual awakenings in an audience that really just hadn't seen anything like that on stage before. I think it's tricky to get past a lot of what we think about Elvis as this oftentimes like older Elvis, this guy on stage in the white jumpsuit and the rhinestones sweating in Vegas later in life.

I think that one of the things that Elvis actually accomplishes really well is to show why he felt so seismic as a performer on screen for a lot of audiences who had just not seen anything like this before. I think that's credit to Baz Luhrmann and also to Austin Butler, and I think what's really difficult who can play Elvis, he does a really good job.

Arun: Apollo 10 1⁄2 is an animated movie that came out earlier this year on Netflix. It's by Richard Linklater, flew under the radar, right, Rafer, but you liked it, didn't you?

Rafer: Yes. Under the radar is an understatement. I know very few people who have seen this film, didn't get a lot of publicity. It's one of Linklater's rotoscoped movies where basically it looks like animation, but they paint over the live footage. It's like a fictionalized memoir about growing up during the late 1960s as the moon landing is approaching. It's told from the viewpoint of this little kid, he's about 10 and a half years old, the voice of Jack Black, he's a fictional kid. He's a stand-in for Richard Linklater.

It's an oddball little movie because, on the one hand, it's just this wonderful, beautifully observed memoir about all the little details that you remember about growing up every board game, every television show, the way the telephones looked, the way the carpeting looked, literally everything you can think of. There's a little bit of a strange fictional fantasy aspect to it that didn't work that well for me, but I was willing to just ride out this warm bath of nostalgia that Richard Linklater is so good at, that he dazed and confused.

Everybody wants some, he's so good at that stuff and I like this movie.

Arun: All right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more movies.

[music]

Back with you on The Takeaway. I'm Arun Venugopal and we've been taking a trip to the movies to find out about some of the most exciting releases of summer 2022. Still with me, our film critics, Rafer Guzman and Alison Wilmore. We're going to look ahead now to other movies that have been coming out and will be coming on the coming weeks. Alison, we got to talk about Top Gun: Maverick, I feel which is highest-grossing movie that's so far this year. Why do you think this sequel worked? It's come universally praise, hasn't it?

Alison: Yes, it has. I think it's one of those movies where you might not have fought hearing about it from afar that it was going to be the critical or box office hit that it has turned out to be, but I think that one of the reasons that it's been so successful is that there's been a certain sameness to what box office or to what blockbuster spectacle has looked like recently. It's very heavy on computer-generated action sequences. They're often done by other people, aside from the director in a lot of these really big superhero movies.

There is this sense that a lot of these movies end up looking the same in terms of what a giant set piece looks like. I think the real superpower of Top Gun: Maverick beyond Tom Cruise's still got that movie star draw is that you see actual planes being used in actual aerial action sequences. It looks great. There really is something about just the physics, the way that like G-Force on the actor's faces, you can see it. It really makes a difference in terms of, I think just feeling a sense of stakes in these action sequences.

I would think it's that, and that this real sense of this melancholy that's attached to all the nostalgia of this movie, the characters are getting older, but they're still revisiting the same triumphs and stunts. Tom Cruise, he gets called the last movie star a lot. I feel like in some ways, this movie is about him being the last movie star, but he's still really has this ability to just light up the screen that I do think is rare.

Arun: The man just turned 60 last week but I guess this is not the time where he's like unveiling his beer gut or anything out to the world.

Alison: No, he seems to be really trying to outrun time, effective time using all sorts of planes and trains and technology.

Arun: Jordan Peele's next movie is also coming out. That's later this month. It's called Nope. Here are Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun in the trailer.

Emerald Haywood: You think whatever killed Pops is out there?

Ricky Park: Right here, you are going to witness an absolute spectacle.

Arun: Rafer, you put Nope on your list of most anticipated movies, but with some reservations. What's your mixed feelings here?

Rafer: Yes, I have a lot of mixed feelings about some of the movies that are coming up. It's been a thin year so far and it still seems like a thin year. Some of the trailers for movies I've noticed are not really grabbing me the way that I want to but I am really interested in Nope. The trailers remain a mystery. We don't really know what the movie is about. All we know is Keke Palmer and also Daniel Kaluuya is in this movie from Get Out. They're living on a ranch in California somewhere. Some strange things begin to happen and that's about all we know.

What I'm really mostly going on here is the Jordan Peele name. Get Out was such a galvanizing, incredible film that just changed the way people are making horror films and thinking about horror films. I think he continued that, maybe not with quite as much success with us, but that was a really interesting and very strange movie. I like the title. I think it's a funny title, Nope for a horror movie. I'm holding out hopes that the movie will be better than the marketing.

Arun: We've got Bullet Train coming out soon. That's got Brad Pitt as an aging hitman. I've seen the trailer for that. It's kind of kooky, fun, musician Bad Bunny is also part of the cast. Alison, you're looking forward to this movie?

Alison: I am. It's directed by David Leitch, who is really one of those guys, who's a former stunt coordinator, who went on to be involved with John Wick and then to direct Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron. He and the people who work with him really have done a lot to change what we think of action on screen. I was just talking about before how there's a real reliance on a lot of really computer-generated imagery but a lot of these movies, they have really beautifully choreographed fight sequences in a way that really movies here stepped away from for a long time.

I'm looking forward to Bullet Train mostly because, in addition, to the cast being just a wild collection of actors, I just want to see people do action where you can see their whole bodies and see the whole fight sequence happen, especially in a tight quarter like a bullet train. I think that leads to all fun possibilities in terms of a fight sequence.

Arun: Rafer, you're looking ahead a little beyond the summer, I guess. David O Russell's Amsterdam, there hasn't been so much info released on this one yet, but we did just get a trailer and you seem to be looking forward to this, huh?

Rafer: Yes, this is one of these movies. This is what David O Russell does. He gets almost literally everyone in Hollywood to be in his film. The leads are Christian Bale, Margott Robbie, and John David Washington. They play a doctor, a nurse, and a lawyer who get themselves involved in a murder in the 1930s. They have to clear their names but like the rest of the cast, there's Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert De Niro, Taylor Swift. It's like the only people that aren't in this movie are the three of us sitting here like we're the only ones that didn't get cast in this.

I think it looks fun. It looks maybe a little bit Knives Out, maybe a little bit Death on the Nile. There's some Big Lebowski-esque scenes of humor in it. I think when David O Russell hits, like when he's done a Silver Linings Playbook or an American Hustle, he can really knock it out of the park. Sometimes, not so much, like with the Joy, the Jennifer Lawrence movie. I was not a big fan of that one, but when he's on, he's really on. Again, the trailer is a little iffy, but I'm looking forward to the movie and I hope it's good.

Arun: Alison, do you have a pick for your least favorite or most disappointing movie of the summer so far?

Alison: That's a tough call, but maybe I'll give it to an upcoming movie, The Gray Man, which is another assassin movie. This one's starring Ryan Gosling. It's Netflix's big blockbuster attempts. It just does a lot of stuff that you've seen before, and it's from directors I've liked. I'd say that it's time, we all are going out to the movies now. We want to see a little more.

Arun: You feel that way, too, Rafer, that things are kind of up and running again?

Rafer: About going out? Sure. Yes, I'm anxious to see as many movies as I possibly can. I'm sick of sitting at home and watching streaming content with the big screen.

Arun: Totally. Rafer Guzman is a film critic for Newsday, and Alison Wilmore is film critic at Vulture and New York Magazine. Thanks so much to you both.

Ray: Thanks, Arun.

Alison: Thanks for having us.

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