There's something for everyone in theaters this weekend: the latest entry in The Conjuring horror franchise, a recording of the Broadway musical Hamilton in honor of its 10th anniversary, and more. Here are your choices.
The Conjuring: Last Rites
In theaters Friday
The horror franchise The Conjuring has generated billions of dollars across many films and spinoffs full of hauntings, demonic possession and creepy dolls. Now, The Conjuring: Last Rites purports to wind down the story of the real-life demon-hunting couple whose exploits inspired the series. The movies are based — very loosely — on the lives of Lorraine and Ed Warren, who claimed to investigate paranormal activity: demonic possession, haunted houses, that sort of thing. They're played in the movies by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, and are portrayed as a deeply loving couple with an unshakable bond.
The Conjuring: Last Rites brings their story to a close as they battle one last demonic threat: a house in Pennsylvania that contains a haunted mirror and a terrified family. The Warrens are near the end of their careers, giving lectures to indifferent crowds when they're not doting over their adult daughter Judy, played by Mia Tomlinson. But they get slowly and inexorably sucked back into demon hunting, even as it endangers their lives and members of their family. – Stephen Thompson
Hamilton
In theaters Friday
Released at the height of the pandemic on Disney+, this terrific film-capture of the original Broadway production is now being widely released in theaters to honor the 10th anniversary of the rap-infused, cross-culturally cast musical's Broadway debut. It's the stage Hamilton Broadway audiences saw in June 2016, right after the show won a slew of Tony awards and a Pulitzer, and just before the dazzling original cast scattered. They do dazzle — from composer/lyricist/star Lin-Manuel Miranda's Alexander Hamilton, to Daveed Diggs as a rock star of a Thomas Jefferson, to Phillipa Soo's vulnerable Eliza.
The show begins as its title character is arriving in New York, still a teenager in 1776, and we follow his progress as he raps and strategizes his way into history and onto the $10 bill, much to the annoyance of Aaron Burr, played by Leslie Odom Jr. as a cross between Iago and Salieri.
You'll have heard that Miranda's storytelling is every bit as revolutionary as the story: history as a hip-hop adrenaline rush. Its masterstroke — the casting of the nation's founders as people of color — brings fresh resonance to notions of a nation of immigrants unshackling themselves from their king.
Capturing live theater has advanced since the days when filmmakers put one camera in the balcony and another on the lip of the stage. What director Thomas Kail has crafted here is revolution as revelation, with lighting that explodes in blasts of cannon fire, cameras choreographed to stutter through battlefields then swoop in for intimate close-ups that no fifth-row orchestra seat could match, all for a story that reflects the tumult of the birth of America through the tumult of the times we're living. – Bob Mondello
Twinless
In theaters Friday
Rocky and Roman (actor Dylan O'Brien doing double-duty) are identical twins — Rocky gay, smart, and charismatic, Roman straight and not the sharpest tool in the shed. When Rocky dies, Roman moves into his New York apartment and joins a therapy group for twins grieving the loss of their other halves. In the group, he meets Dennis (filmmaker James Sweeney), a twink-y, quippy graphic designer, and they bond, first thru shopping and grabbing sandwiches together, then with Dennis offering Roman grieving support. A revelation (to the audience, not to Roman) about Dennis' past makes the character's motives start to seem dicier, and what had been a largely comic look at grief and the interconnectedness of twins turns darker. Both actors are persuasive, as is a supporting cast that includes Aisling Franciosi (as a receptionist coworker Dennis seriously underestimates), and Abbott Elementary's Chris Perfetti (as a friend of Rocky's). The plot's twists are head-snapping and occasionally credulity-straining, but the ride's fun. – Bob Mondello
The Threesome
In theaters Friday
Rom-coms have been an endangered movie species of late, and there've been some interesting attempts at reinvention. But it's safe to say filmmaker Chad Hartigan and screenwriter Ethan Ogilby have come up with a fresh, genre-stretching variation. The titular three are Olivia (Zoey Deutch) a waitress who meets cute with sound engineer Connor (Jonah Hauer-King) at a wedding, and grad student Jenny (Ruby Cruz), who they encounter together a bit later. A pot-fuelled, three-way game of Truth or Dare leads to a kiss and then more. And then to so much more than any of them expected.
I'll stop there, as the story's twists are worth experiencing for yourself. Let's just say that the three leads negotiate with seeming ease moments that veer from laughter to crisis and back in the space of a single scene. Deutch sends caustic lines spinning, Hauer-King fields them with the same winning sincerity he brought to The Little Mermaid's Prince, and Cruz has a sweet radiance even when things aren't remotely going her way. The film is about a messy situation (several messy situations, actually) so it makes sense that it's a tad messy itself. But the filmmakers are smart enough not to settle for pat jokes or easy answers, and in its own complicated, ineffably lifelike way, the story they've crafted is singularly affecting. – Bob Mondello
Riefenstahl
In limited theaters across the country in the fall
As the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl was young, directing and starring in Alpine adventure films before she found her muse in Adolf Hitler. They worked closely on fashioning his image and that of the Nazi movement in a series of propaganda films about the mass party rallies and torchlight marches such as Triumph of the Will and a monumental spectacle Olympia, about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Both films won top prizes at the Venice Film Festival in the 1930s. In 2024, Andres Veiel premiered his documentary about her there.
Riefenstahl, although briefly kept under house arrest by French occupation forces, and tried no less than four times by denazification courts, was never formally convicted of complicity in the crimes of the Nazis. She was designated, like so many of her compatriots, as a "Mitläufer" or "a fellow traveler" rather than an integral figure of the regime. Budd Schulberg, the erstwhile screenwriter and Sports Illustrated journalist, serving as an OSS officer was sent to arrest her in 1945, and found her to be morally defiant and willfully ignorant of the horrors of the Holocaust in equal measure, a stance she maintained her whole life.
Riefenstahl deftly undertakes the type of media autopsy usually reserved for the most fiendish of true-crime cover-ups. What Veiel does best is grapple with her reputation in a morass of chaotic yet meticulously vetted materials she left behind: Hours of taped answering machine messages, boxes of correspondence with admirers and a trove of still images from film shoots and her life in Munich after the war; a rich and revealing archive away from the threat of libel suits, of which she said won over 50 in her lifetime. Quixotically ranging her innocence and her indolence at a debased post-war West German cultural elite with its insistence on "politics" over "art," Leni Riefenstahl shrinks on screen to an obdurate core, protesting the purity of her genius to the end. The artist Leni Riefenstahl, so she would have it, is innocent of all charges because she was ignorant of all the political ugliness and saw only beauty. — Daniel Jonah Wolpert
The Baltimorons
Out in New York City on Friday, nationwide Sept. 12
Christmas arrives a few months early at cinemas in this charmer about a recovering comedian and the dentist he meets after knocking out a tooth on Christmas Eve. Cliff (Michael Strassner) is a 30-something screwup in a lot of ways — though he's just gotten his six-month sobriety chip, so he's succeeding at that. When he accidentally smashes, jaw-first, into a doorframe, Didi (Liz Larsen), a no-nonsense workaholic, seems the only dentist still at work in downtown Baltimore.
Good luck for him, but the luck doesn't hold — Cliff's car gets towed while he's in her chair, leaving him stranded; Didi's daughter bails on Christmas Eve dinner to attend a wedding reception for Didi's ex-husband — leaving them two lost souls with nothing to do on the loneliest night of the year.
At this point, Cliff's improv skills kick in as he suggests they spend some time together, and despite a two-decade disparity in their ages, they're soon impound-lot-trespassing, party-crashing, night-crab-fishing and, in violation of Cliff's agreement with his fiancée (who worries it'll drive him back to drink), doing improv on stage.
Jay Duplass, whose career started in the indie film scene known as mumblecore and is now an established actor, producer, and director, is making his big screen solo-directing debut here, and it's as assured and as generous to his performers as anyone could ask. Strassner, who's credited as a co-writer, makes Cliff a garrulous, vulnerable teddy bear with a mischievous streak; Larsen's Didi is understandably skeptical at first, but when she starts to trust him, the warmth in her smile lights up the screen.
The film is sincere and light of touch, bittersweet and shambling, and as winning as its tinkling piano score by composer Jordan Seigel. It is also an unabashed love note to the blue collar neighborhoods and harbor-scape of Baltimore, which have never looked more inviting on screen. – Bob Mondello
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