Presenting My Fourth Annual Village Voice Summer Movie Preview

It's a tradition! Here once again I choose a dozen movies due in the next three months for which I've got medium-high hopes.

A Split Decision for Chuck

Liev Schreiber and Ron Perlman in Philippe Falardeau's Chuck Wepner biopic. (Sarah Shatz/IFC)

Here's my NPR review of Chuck, a biopic about Chuck Wepner, the self-sabotaging New Jersey boxer who inspired Sylvester Stallone to write Rocky.  It ain't bad, but I wanted to love it. Anyway, Rocky already has a wonderful latter-day lega-sequel.

Gunsmoke Gets in Your Eyes: Free Fire, reviewed.

Brie Larson protects her personal space. (A24)

Ben Wheatley's new comic thriller Free Fire is a feature-length-gun-battle-as-anti-gun-PSA. I enjoyed it, as far as it goes.

Diesel Fumes: The Fate of the Furious, reviewed.

Xander Cage as Dominic Toretto. (Universal)

We all know the inexplicably prolonged Fast & Furious series can't touch Mad Max: Fury Road or even its closer competitor the Mission: Impossible franchise, right? We all know that?

Even by the series' own standards of allegedly intentional badness, the new The Fate of the Furious is a sour lemon. (136 minutes, four good scenes.) Here's my NPR review.

Imperfect Organism: Life, reviewed.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson are better than Life. (Sony)

Life, the new anti-space-exploration space movie from Swedish director Daniel Espinosa and starring my beloved Rebecca "Ilsa Faust" Ferguson plus some other famous people, is no Gravity. Or Interstellar. Or The Martian. But it's aight. I reviewed it for NPR, and then, having finished reviewing Life, I recalled The Onion's lovely backhanded obituary for Roger Ebert from 2013.

Ape-Pocalypse Now: Kong: Skull Island, reviewed.

This Bell UH-1 Huey is 'bout to get rung. (Warner Bros.)

Look, I'm no hero, but did you happen to notice that my NPR review of Kong: Skull Island contains not one occurrence of "titular" or "eponymous"? Please notice that.

Time for Carrousel: Logan, reviewed

The family that hides together, abides together. Dafne Keen, Patrick Stewart, and Hugh Jackman in Logan. (Fox)

I'm looking forward to the argument we're going to have over beers, you and I, about whether Logan is the best comic book movie since The Dark Knight or the best Western since No Country for Old Men. 

Here's my NPR review, where I ran out of space to cite all the things I loved about this movie (Eriq La Salle! Autotrucks!), or to warn you that if you know you will recoil from the sight of an 11-year-old girl defending her life with lethal force, you should skip it. And it would probably be more correct to call it the Rocky Balboa of Rocky movies than the Creed of Rocky movies, but sometimes clarity is more important than pinpoint accuracy.

Bring tissues.