New trailers: Passengers, Hidden Figures, Dog Eat Dog, and more

All the shows and movies you should be looking out for

5

Our dearest Jake is off duty, so I will be taking over the trailer round-up this week. I’ve noticed that Jake usually kicks things off with a nice little anecdote about what he’s been watching in his free time, and it’s always such a pure delight, but I’ve been in a bit of a fugue state recently, so all I’ve been doing is rewatching random episodes of Trailer Park Boys. Like the saying goes: sometimes the best medicine is a Canadian accent and a lot of alcohol.

I also watched the first episode of HBO’s The Night Of, and was really turned off by the knife-play girl whose Brooklyn apartment looks like Zooey Deschanel’s haunted dollhouse. But (spoiler alert!) her speaking role is limited to the first episode because... she can no longer talk once the thing that happens to her happens to her. So maybe I should give it another try.

Oh, and I watched Fatal Attraction. Glenn Close is terrifying but Michael Douglas is a tool and I honestly wouldn’t care if he got murdered. (In the movie!)

Here are 8 new trailers to watch this week.

Hidden Figures

Here’s a new trailer for Hidden Figures, a movie about the three NASA engineers, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), responsible for getting an astronaut into Earth’s orbit for the first time. It comes out on January 13th, and by the time the depths of winter come around, it should be just the dose of cautious optimism we need.

Dog Eat Dog

Dog Eat Dog is a movie that I feel like already exists, unless I’m thinking of Dog Day Afternoon or Air Bud. Anyway this dog movie, directed by Paul Schrader, stars Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe as ex-convicts who get involved in a scheme to kidnap a baby. It’s out November 18th and it looks bloody.

Passengers

Here’s another look at Passengers, the pretty movie with bad dialogue. It looks like Chris Pratt gets to carry some heavy things and most likely save the day (but who knows?), continuing the cinematic theme of Chris Pratt saving beautiful women from certain death. It’s out December 21st.

A Town Called Panic: Double Fun

A Town Called Panic, besides sounding like a nice place to honeymoon, is also the name of a Belgian stop-motion animated comedy, and A Town Called Panic: Double Fun is its kind-of sequel. The movie is really two shorts, Christmas Panic and Back to School Panic, starring three characters named Horse, Cowboy, and Indian. It looks goofy but fun, and full of unseasonal holiday cheer. Double Fun will screen in select theaters tonight (September 24th) only.

Amanda Knox

Yet another true crime series will exist soon, and this one is about the notorious case of Amanda Knox. Knox was accused (along with her boyfriend) of murdering another young woman while in Italy in 2007 and spent four years in prison before being acquitted of the crime. It was a tabloid extravaganza, and now Netflix and directors Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn are sorting through the rubble to make some sense of it. The rumors coming out of TIFF were that the series didn’t contain too many big revelations, but if you’re looking for your Serial or The Jinx or Making a Murderer or OJ: Made in America or The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey fix it should do fine. It lands on Netflix on September 30th. - Kaitlyn Tiffany

Allied

"Allied, that movie starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard" is how this movie will be known from now on. It’s set in 1942; Pitt is an intelligence officer and Cotillard is a French resistance fighter. The rest is (fictionalized) history. It comes out November 23rd.

Hamilton's America

Sometimes you can just tell that something is going to become a huge freaking deal. Obviously Lin-Manuel Miranda had that feeling when piecing together and rehearsing his historical hip-hop musical Hamilton, because he had someone film the whole process. The resulting documentary is coming to PBS on October 21st. It puts you in "the room where it happened," or some other reference / joke! If you missed your opportunity to see the original cast — including Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, and Daveed Diggs — on stage, this is your chance. Don’t throw away your shot! Or a different joke. - KT

The Red Turtle

The Red Turtle is co-produced by Studio Ghibli so you know it’s going to be a beautiful thing to watch, but the premise seems interesting, too: a man trapped on a desert island meets a giant turtle who helps him experience all the milestones in his life. Do we all cry now?