This week, Denzel and Spike return to theaters together for the first time in decades, four mutant turtles return for their anniversary run in cineplexes, and a strange and original horror movie returns for a second-week swing at box office success.
Highest 2 Lowest
In theaters Friday
When a camera soaring high above New York City first spots music mogul David King (Denzel Washington), he's pacing the balcony of his penthouse apartment, fleshing out a deal to buy back a controlling interest in Stackin' Hits Records, the now-struggling label he founded 25 years ago. Though his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) don't know it yet, David's putting up their penthouse, and the art that makes it seem as if they're living in a museum of Black Excellence — everything they have, really — to finance the deal. Just as he's pulled the cash together, he gets a call saying Trey's been kidnapped. David can pay the ransom for his son, but it's not that simple: The kidnapper didn't get Trey. He got Trey's best friend Kyle, the son of David's driver and friend Paul (Jeffrey Wright).
If you've seen the film that inspired this Spike Lee joint — Akira Kurosawa's Heaven and Hell, or as it was known in this country, High and Low — you know the stakes are about to change radically. Will David nix the deal to ransom his driver's son? This doesn't really qualify as a moral dilemma; there is a right answer, and David eventually agrees to the kidnapper's terms. But again, it's not that simple.
Kurosawa staged the ransom handoff on a speeding train, and in this reimagining — or maybe remix? … cover version? — Lee starts the sequence off with a subway crammed with chanting fans headed for Yankee Stadium, then throws in motorcycles, police cruisers, and a street concert by Eddie Palmieri and his orchestra. It's one of the flashiest action sequences you're likely to see anytime soon. And with all that, he still hasn't gotten to the good stuff.
It's been almost 20 years since Lee and Washington collaborated (in Inside Man) but their teamwork remains flawless. A$AP Rocky is terrific in an impromptu rap-battle-through-glass with Washington that will be the film's most-talked-about scene. And everywhere there are grace notes — cameos, recreations of art from Spike Lee's own collection, in-jokes — to complement the pulsing, vibrant, rousing, seriously musical, and occasionally even profound entertainment that is Highest 2 Lowest. — Bob Mondello
Weapons
In theaters
Weapons, which debuted at the top of last weekend's box office, begins with something that seems impossible: One night, in the suburb of Maybrook, every student (save one) from Justine Gandy's third-grade classroom gets up at 2:17 a.m., goes downstairs, walks out of the house, and silently runs off into the night. They are gone, 17 of them. They are caught on doorbell cameras or security cameras, disappearing into the woods or just into the darkness. Suspicion falls on Justine (Julia Garner), for the simple reason that nobody can figure out how these kids could disappear unless something was happening in that classroom, on her watch. Were they coerced to run away? Convinced? Was there some kind of a plan? She says no, she doesn't know, she doesn't know. The one boy who remains, Alex (Cary Christopher), offers no answers either.
In large part, not unlike HBO's 2014 series The Leftovers and the novel that inspired it, Weapons is a story about a community recovering from an inexplicable trauma that arrives like a natural disaster, wreaks havoc, and then cannot be reversed, only survived. But there is another thing, another Whole Thing going on in this story, which I would not spoil for anything, because it is simply too wonderfully scary and strange. If you see Weapons with a raucous crowd, which you should, and if all of you forgive yourselves and each other for reacting out loud when you can't help it, you may hear yourself say, in the quietest voice you possess, "Ohhhh, absolutely not." I left the theater not to a monster in the passenger seat, and not to comfort either, but to more mundane worries: for my own safety and security, for other people's safety and security, for the future. — Linda Holmes
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
In theaters for an anniversary re-release
I won't lie to you: as a child in the early '90s, I was too young to fully appreciate the Darwinian wonders of chemically-mutated turtles who roamed the sewers of New York City under the guidance of a human-sized rat. I certainly couldn't have spelled out "bodacious," either. And yet, I never once questioned the appeal of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT).
Starting Friday and until Aug. 21st, TMNT will be back in theaters for its 35th anniversary. The showing will include a pre-film featurette with deleted scenes and never-before-seen behind-the-scenes footage, much to the nerdy, nostalgia-induced joy of longtime fans like myself. I couldn't be happier as a millennial dad.
Despite its early skeptics, the original Turtles succeeded by most metrics. You get what you would in any solid comic book adaptation today — corny action and one liners — but you also get something extra and nearly impossible in modern movies: filmmakers taking bold risks with zero corporate oversight. Because of that, this old school version of TMNT is the only movie I'd consider taking my son to this summer. By the cosmic grace of the sewer turtle gods, he's about the same age I was when I became a turtle fan. And to that, I say "cowabunga." — Alan Chazaro
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