An action star makes his Oscar bid in a skull-cracking biopic, and a pop star makes her album publicity bid with a music video reveal. Elsewhere, cinemas host a trio of triumphant returns — the re-release of an epic fantasy that's among the biggest box office hits ever; the emergence from retirement of one of the great actors of our age; and the freshly resurfaced pronouncements of a long-dead dystopian author with much to say about the world we find ourselves in today.
Here's what you'll find in theaters this weekend.
The Smashing Machine
In theaters Friday
This trailer includes instances of vulgar language.
With biceps and pecs bulging like balloons, pioneering Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and mixed martial arts champ Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) appears all but invincible in the ring, but turns oddly fragile and uncertain when he steps out of it. Benny Safdie's intriguing biopic joins the former college wrestler as he's making his MMA debut in Brazil in 1997, pulverizing his opponent with headbutts, kicks, and flurries of punishing punches, then worrying whether the poor guy's okay. This gentle giant theme turns out to be central to the film's casting. Kerr's supportive best pal, sometime rival, and fellow MMA fighter Mark Coleman is played with persuasive compassion by former UFC fighter Ryan Bader, and his concerned trainer by Kerr's actual one-time trainer, former UFC fighter Bas Rutten. All three big, battered, dangerous-looking lugs tend to back down when confronted by Kerr's fiercely loyal girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) who is a gum-chewing, manipulative, needy mess, but who is also reliably there for her man.
Having established its central foursome, the film doesn't take them anywhere in particular, but it's a sharp showcase for Johnson's remarkable physical transformation, and his acting chops as it reproduces many of the beats of the 2002 documentary — also called The Smashing Machine — that chronicled Kerr's struggles with narcotics and his emotionally volatile home life.
The Official Release Party of a Showgirl
In theaters Friday through Sunday
A new Taylor Swift album isn't just about the music — it's an event, and that includes a theatrical release party. "Dancing is optional but very much encouraged," Swift posted on Instagram about the 89-minute soirée, which will include the premiere of a video for the song "The Fate of Ophelia," behind-the-scenes footage and the singer's reflections. We don't know much else, except that it's likely to rule the box office this weekend. It runs Friday through Sunday.
Anemone
In theaters Friday
Eight years after stepping away from acting, Daniel Day-Lewis emerges silver-haired and roaring with rage from a retirement no one else wanted for him. What's brought him back is a family drama directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis — the story of an estranged father and son, written jointly by this clearly anything-but-estranged father and son. The elder Day-Lewis plays Ray, a brooding recluse who's been living in self-imposed exile in a bare-bones cabin in the Irish woods for two decades. He hunts, cooks meals on a wood stove, keeps fit by running, and seemingly has no outside life, the only grace in his hermit-like existence provided by the delicate white flowers his father once cultivated that give the film its title.
His solitude is interrupted by the arrival of his brother Jem (Sean Bean) whose wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) has sent along a note urging Ray to visit their home to help resolve a family crisis involving their troubled, angry son Brian (Samuel Bottomley). I'll leave you to discover how all that plays out, with a backstory involving no shortage of betrayals by lovers, military commanders, relatives and parish priests. In his feature-directing debut, the younger Day-Lewis gives the dense Irish woodlands a claustrophobic majesty and elicits a furiously magnetic performance from his father. That the performance feels bigger than the film that contains it hardly matters. It's a thrill to have the actor back.
Orwell: 2+2=5
In limited theaters Friday
"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world," intones actor Damian Lewis, who gives voice to the writings of British author George Orwell in Raoul Peck's urgent documentary. Every word in the film was written by Orwell, and Peck illustrates them with unabashed fury, images filling the screen to illuminate the doublethink that Orwell called "newspeak" — official language used to alter reality and to manipulate. The filmmaker, who has previously made striking films about James Baldwin and Karl Marx, uses archival footage, news reports, and clips from a startling array of films, including several screen iterations of Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, to offer both a portrait of the author and an overview of a century's worth of geopolitics.
Beginning with the tenets of totalitarianism the novel put forth — "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength" — the film superimposes real-world governmental pronouncements about "peacekeeping operations" over images of a burning bombed city, "vocational training center" over a concentration camp, "legal use of force" over police brutality. The 2024 re-election of Donald Trump is the film's evident inflection point, with an emphasis on the President's continued denial that he'd lost the previous election. The filmmaker juxtaposes footage of violence at the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the capitol and a MAGA-hatted man urging that there be "heads on pikes," as President Trump's voice intones "they were peaceful people … the love in the air, I've never seen anything like it." Peck details how Orwell's police service in 1920s Burma (now Myanmar) sparked his awareness of "unjustifiable tyranny" and informed his view of repressive social hierarchies, oppressive politics, and official obfuscation. The filmmaker isn't subtle, but then, neither was his subject, and the film's points could hardly seem more prescient than they do in this moment.
Avatar: The Way of Water (re-release)
In theaters for one week starting Friday
More than a decade after the Na'vi first sent Pandora's invading humans packing, the digitized wonders of their world had mostly healed by the time this sequel came out in 2022. Jake Sully, the first film's hero, having given up his human body for his avatar one, was tall, blue and handsome on a permanent basis, and proud papa to four kids. Alas, just minutes into the movie, they spot what looks like a new star in the heavens and realize the sky people are back. James Cameron's concentration on family was new this time, but the thing that stayed constant was the filmmaker's obviously sincere passion about the environment — Pandora's ecosystem is in perfect balance until the arrival of humans. It was a notion on which this sequel doubled down. No more talk of strip-mining unobtainium, possibly because it sounds silly. Now the reason humans have come to Pandora is they've wrecked planet Earth and need a new planet to despoil. That, as Cameron is well aware as he readies the franchise's third installment Avatar: Fire and Ash for release in December, doesn't sound silly at all.
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