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Docs are prominent among specialty releases this weekend with South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker renovating a massive Mexican restaurant and creative takes on psychics, oysters, Abraham Lincoln and Casablanca bread riots. The Thicket starring Peter Dinklage marks Tubi Films’ first non-day-and-date release. French Canadian chiller Red Rooms gets a U.S bow from Utopia. Screens for indie fare have been scarce and are now running over with Tim Burton’s anticipated wide release Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
¡CASA BONITA MI AMOR! starts a limited run this weekend and has been racking up significant presales that promise one of the highest per-screen averages for a documentary since Covid at its first stop, Alamo Denver. Deadline hears theaters initially scheduled two shows a day but have been upping that to 4-5 shows, possibly with more to be added.
Directed by Arthur Bradford, the doc premiered at Tribeca where it won the audience award, and recently jam packed two screenings at Telluride. Sweet Relief, in association with MTV Documentary Films, are rolling it out to nine other markets next week, most Alamo Drafthouse theaters, including New York and LA.
Love for the iconic duo runs deep and this may also be a hopeful sign for docs, which have been slower to recover at the box office than other indies and studios fare.
Casa Bonita, called the “Disneyland of Mexican restaurants”, opened in 1974 in an unassuming Denver strip mall, a massive Old West and Acapulco-inspired fever dream made famous by its indoor waterfall, cliff divers, and haunted caves. The restaurant held mythic status for Stone and Parker (and endless other who grew up going there as kids) and was featured in a classic 2003 episode of South Park.
The 54,000-square foot landmark closed in 2020 during Covid and the South Park creators bought it to renovate and reopen. Bradford follows their journey as the budget swelled well past the $6 million anticipated (ultimately topping $40 million) and the project often seemed impossible. The partners, with an intrepid band of contractors, faced down rot, danger, and a falcon that had been dropping pigeon carcasses onto the roof since the 1970s.
Debuts on Paramount+ this fall.
Hybrid documentary The Mother Of All Lies (100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 26 reviews) opens in limited release from Outsider Pictures. Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir made history at the 20th edition of Morocco’s Marrakech Film Festival as the first local director to win its top prize for the film inspired by the bread riots in El Moudir’s home city of Casablanca in 1981. She creates a replica of the neighborhood where it happened and figurines to explore the lasting trauma of the event. World premiered at Cannes 2023, where it won the Un Certain Regard Directing Prize and shared the Golden Eye prize for the Best Documentary with Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters. It was Morocco’s Best International Film Oscar submission.
Opens at the Alamo Drafthouse Liberty in New York ahead of a national expansion.
A24’s Look Into My eyes by Lana Wilson follows a group of New York City psychics who conduct deeply intimate readings for their clients, revealing a kaleidoscope of loneliness, connection, and healing. The well reviewed doc premiered at Sundance, with its international premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Opens at the Film Forum in NYC.
DOC NYC selection, Emily Packer’s Holding Back the Tide – a meditation on New York’s oyster population and its transformation in uncertain future – opens at NYC’s DCTV Firehouse this weekend with nightly Q&As, adding LA Oct. 6 with a North American release to follow courtesy of Grasshopper Film. It’s Gotham, IDA and Sundance supported and was shot entirely in NYC and along its waterways. The hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital, and the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city.
Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln examines the intimate life of America’s most consequential president as told by preeminent Lincoln scholars and never before seen photographs and letters. Director Shaun Peterson details Lincoln’s romantic relationships with men, the history of human sexual fluidity and the profound differences between sexual mores of the nineteenth century and those we hold today. Produced and distributed by Special Occasion Studios.
Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen from investigative journalist Greg Palast opens for a weeklong run at the Cinelounge Sunset. The doc centers on vigilante challenges by self-appointed vote-fraud hunters targeting well over one million voters to challenge and block the counting of their ballots.
New features: Utopia debuts festival circuit hit Red Rooms on 53 screens, including in the IFC Center in NY Laemmle NoHo and Laemmle Monica in LA. Written and directed by Quebec filmmaker Pascal Plante (Nadia, Butterfly, Fake Tattoos).
The high-profile case of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) has just gone to trial, and Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is obsessed. When reality blurs with her morbid fantasies, she goes down a dark path to seek the final piece of the puzzle: the missing video of a murdered 13-year-old girl, to whom Kelly-Anne bears a disturbing resemblance.
Premiered at Karlovy Vary International film festival, Deadline’s review called it a “disturbingly brilliant psychological horror.” Played Fantasia International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia, collecting awards for acting, screenplay, best film and motion picture score. It was nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards and 13 Irises, Quebec’s highest award for artistic merit, after its release there last year. Gariépy was awarded the 2023 Revelation of the Year accolade for emerging talent and Babin, who plays a conspiracy-peddler who believes Ludovic is innocent, took Best Supporting Actress. At 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a NYT Critic’s Pick.
Luna Carmoon’s Venice 2023 award-winner Hoard from Sunrise Films opens in limited release, starring Joseph Quinn and Saura Lightfoot-Leon. With Hayley Squires, Lily-Beau Leach, Deba Hekmat and Samantha Spiro.
Seven-year-old Maria and her mother live in their own loving but surreal world built on sorting through bins and collecting shiny rubbish into an overflowing house. One night, things fall apart and we join Maria a decade later living with her foster mother. Debuted at Venice in 2023, winning three prizes including the Audience award and a special mention for Lightfoot-Leon, and went on to an extended festival run.
Dark Western The Thicket starring Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis opens in 50+ theaters across the top 25 DMA’s including a run at the Angelika in NYC. The first theatrical only (non day-and-date) release from Tubi Films, which also produced, is being distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films. It heads to the Deauville Film Festival next week and the Calgary Film Festival, where it was shot, later this month. Elliott Lester directs this adaptation of a novel of the same name by Joe Lansdale, where fierce bounty hunter Reginald Jones (Dinklage) is tasked with tracking down a ruthless killer known as Cutthroat Bill. He rallies a band of unlikely heroes on a quest that leads them into the deadly no-man’s-land known as The Thicket.
Screenplay by Chris Kelley. With Esmé Creed-Miles (Hanna), Levon Hawke (Blink Twice), Macon Blair (I Care a Lot), Andrew Schulz (You People), Metallica’s James Hetfield, David Midthunder (On Sacred Ground), Arliss Howard (Mank), Leslie Grace (In the Heights), and Gbenga Akinnagbe (The Old Man).
His Three Daughters from Netflix opens at about 50 theaters in 30 markets. Azazel Jacobs writes and directs the portrait of family dynamics and dysfunction as three estranged sisters – the powerhouse trio of Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon– converge in a New York apartment to care for their ailing father and try to mend their own broken relationship with one another. Netflix acquired the film out of TIFF last year, see Deadline review. With Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus, Jasmine Bracey, with Jay O. Sanders and Jovan Adepo.
On the streamer Sept. 20.
Brainstorm Media releases Edie Falco-starring comedy drama I’ll Be Right There by Brendan Walsh written by Jim Beggarly. Falco is supermom Wanda, a single mother to adult children with her hands full. Her anxious eight-months pregnant daughter (Kayli Carter) wants a wedding that her ex-husband is flaking on paying for; her mother (Jeannie Berlin) thinks she’s dying, and her wayward son (Charlie Tahan) is either going into rehab or the army. Her long-time boyfriend doesn’t excite her, but her new girlfriend doesn’t either. Streaming Sept. 27.
Music Box Films and Doppelgänger Releasing open New Zealand psychedelic comedy The Paragon from writer-director Michael Duignan in limited release. The quirky saga follows Dutch, an angry former tennis coach whose life has fallen apart since he was the victim of a hit-and-run a year ago. In a bid to find the driver and take revenge, Dutch embarks on a strange psychic training course designed to unlock his latent mind powers. Stars Benedict Wall, Florence Noble, and Jonny Brugh (Thor: Love and Thunder, What We Do in the Shadows). Day and date at the Music Box in Chicago, Hollywood Theater Portland and a handful of Alamo Drafthouse locations.
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