Interpersonal and mind-altering dramas star in April’s new movies
Hallucinating stoners, Algerian ennui and another Minnesota crime story headline April’s cinematic offerings
Spring was once the prelude to the summer blockbuster season, but studios are increasingly pushing out their films with less predictable patterns, which might explain why a classic summer action thriller and a buzzy vehicle for two young mega-stars are both dropping in April, along with these four other intriguing offerings.
‘The Drama’
Could anything be more of the moment than an edgy A24 offering starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson? In director Kristoffer Borgli’s blend of dark comedy and psychological thriller, the two play Emma and Charlie, respectively, a couple on the verge of marrying whose relationship is unmoored by Emma’s disturbing revelations during a game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
As the trailer makes clear, Charlie and the couple’s friends are so shocked by whatever it is that Emma says that the reveal puts their future together in doubt. The film’s jaw-dropping twist, which we won’t reveal here, is already making waves. This “complex, incredibly stressful, provocative and uncomfortably funny” movie “unfolds like a dreadful, violent car wreck that keeps piling up,” said Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture at Letterboxd. (in theaters now)
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
‘Pizza Movie’
A stoner comedy for the age of edibles and ennui, ‘Pizza Movie’ follows the exploits of two college students, Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone), after they take a mysterious, mind-bending drug. Based on a brief video about the ingested substance narrated by Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman, the pair believe that eating a pizza is the only way to save themselves from their increasingly bizarre trip, and so they must make their way downstairs through hallucinations, body swaps, exploding heads and a squad of hostile RAs.
First time directors Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney helm what looks like an uproarious mashup of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” and “A Minecraft Movie.” An “uproariously unhinged” film, “Pizza Movie” is a “low-calorie guilty pleasure that offers just enough new ingredients to a meal you’ve had many times before,” said Zachary Lee at Roger Ebert. (on Hulu now)
‘The Stranger’
It’s hard to imagine a better pairing than decorated French director François Ozon and Albert Camus’ celebrated 1942 novel, “The Stranger.” The first cinematic adaptation of the book since 1967, the film is shot in a gorgeous, sun-drenched, black-and-white reminiscent of Netflix’s “Ripley.”
Benjamin Voisin is Meursault, an emotionally stunted French settler (pied-noir) in Algeria who, after his mother’s death, kills an Algerian man during an altercation and seems to feel nothing about it. The movie, like the novel, unfolds in two parts, following the events leading up to the murder, including Meursault’s relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder) and friendship with Raymond (Pierre Lottin) and then depicting Meursault’s questioning and trial. It’s an “insightful rereading of Camus, vividly evocative of the world it depicts and irreducibly an Ozon film,” said Jonathan Romney at Sight and Sound. (in theaters now)
‘Marama’
An unsettling horror film that confronts the history of British colonialism in New Zealand, first-time director Taratoa Stappard’s “Marama” is set in 1859. A Maori woman known as Mary (Ariana Osborne) is summoned to an estate in Yorkshire, England, where she is promised information about her biological parents.
There she meets Nathanial Cole (Toby Stephens), who speaks Mary’s language and offers her a position as governess for his daughter, who he is oddly raising as Maori. But Mary, whose original name was Marama, soon discovers that his strange obsession with her culture is quite sinister. Then things get wild. The movie “does what horror movies do best, twisting film form into a tool for dissection” of the “society that produced such nightmares,” said Cláudio Alves at The Film Experience. (in theaters April 17)
‘Normal’
Bob Odenkirk may still be best known for his role as the slimy lawyer Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,’ but he’s also been busy reinventing himself as a late-middle-aged action star. In “Normal,” he plays Ulysses, a cop who takes a temporary gig as the sheriff in small-town Normal, Minnesota.
Unfortunately, he finds that behind the Minnesota Nice of people like Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler) is a vast criminal conspiracy that has enlisted seemingly all of the town’s residents and is likely responsible for the sudden vacancy he’s filling. The film, which is well-timed given the centrality of Minnesota to recent U.S. political events, is alternately funny and shocking, as the quirky setup builds inexorably to a gonzo, set-piece shoot-out sequence. Director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) “takes real trends in American life — economic stagnation, rising tribalism, gun fetishism — and follows them to their corrupt, violent end points,” said Katie Rife at IndieWire. (in theaters April 17)
‘Fuze’
A throwback thriller from director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”), Fuze is a heist movie with a particularly clever premise. A 1,000-pound WWII-era bomb is unearthed in London in a scenario clearly drawn from real-life events, after which a massive evacuation and defusing effort commences.
Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and a city police officer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) lead the bomb disposal operation, while a gang of criminals led by Karalis (Theo James) uses the chaos of the bomb’s discovery as cover for a daring bank heist. Amid myriad double crosses and revelations, the various plot machinations converge in satisfying ways. Mackenzie’s lean thriller “prizes style but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension,” said Richard Lawson at The Hollywood Reporter. (in theaters April 24)
