Skip to main content

New trailers: Stranger Things, The Angry Birds Movie 2, and more

New trailers: Stranger Things, The Angry Birds Movie 2, and more

Share this story

Photo: Netflix

Last weekend, I went to see The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and it just does so many things so well. But of all those things, its sharpest feature is its ability to tell big stories in a small way, and it does that again and again.

My fiancée compared the beginning of the film to the beginning of Up, telling essentially the complete story of the movie in a succinct, beautiful, heartbreaking few minutes. It’s such a stunningly confident intro, too, that you go into the movie with an immediate sense of awe and wonder.

My favorite instance of this kind of storytelling, though, is a brief gag in the middle of the movie, where a naked man sits down beside the protagonist on a bench. We see him as a weirdo at first, but the film flips it around and instead shows the troubles of San Francisco at large, rather than laughing at this obviously troubled man’s expense.

Check out seven trailers from this week below.

Stranger Things

With just a few weeks to go before the return of Stranger Things, Netflix has put out the biggest trailer yet, showing how this season is going to up the stakes pretty much across the board, with a bigger monster, a bigger world, and a bigger fight against whatever’s coming out of the Upside Down now. The show returns July 4th.

The Angry Birds Movie 2

There was a time when it seemed like Angry Birds would be the Mario of a generation — a beloved series of characters that reappear again and again in different formats. But I don’t get the sense that people are playing Angry Birds all that much anymore. There’s just... this. It comes out August 14th.

On Becoming a God in Central Florida

I have little idea what this show is about, but it stars Kirsten Dunst, has an amazing name, and looks wonderfully stylized, so I’m totally in. The series premieres August 25th.

The Banana Splits Movie

It’s weird to think about how we culturally got to a place that certain movies exist. I don’t really know what exactly comes together to make The Banana Splits Movie — a love of horror, a need for irony — but here it is: a movie adaptation of a cheery ‘60s kids show that turns some goofy costumed characters into murderous villains for some reason. The movie is going straight to a digital release sometime this summer.

Share

HBO picked up a film from Sundance that’s about a high school girl dealing with an assault she can’t remember, which she finds out about from a video being shared around her school. The film is based on a short by the same director, which won Cannes’ top short film prize in 2015. The feature comes to HBO on July 27th.

Bad Trip

Bad Trip puts a new twist on the Jackass-style prank compilation: it ties all those stunts together with a loosely constructed plot into a feature film. The movie is supposed to combine prank footage that has stars messing with non-actors, strung together with a basic road-trip plot. It stars Tiffany Haddish, Eric Andre, and Lil Rel Howery and comes out October 25th.

Ready or Not

I love a simple and totally ludicrous horror movie plot, and this has the most ludicrous plot.