I watched HBO’s new film Bad Education last week. The whole thing felt a bit like a heist movie in reverse — it’s about a superintendent who’s stealing money from his school district, only you’re watching as the crime unravels, rather than as it plays out.
It’s a fun film, in large part thanks to Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney taking on some big characters. But the movie also takes the course a lot of true-story movies do, where they worry more about telling you what happened than they do about building characters.
I think this works to a point. It’s a wild story, and they do an entertaining job telling it. But I wish the film pushed a little further into who these people are. Showing the crime only as it’s unraveled is a cool way to tell the story, but it also means we don’t get to learn much about what anyone is doing until it’s a bit too late.
Check out nine trailers from this week below.
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Space Force
Almost a decade after leaving The Office, Steve Carell has a new sitcom. While Space Force is a workplace comedy, and Carell is once again playing a boss, he’s taking on a very different role than Michael Scott. In Space Force, he seems to be the one everyone else is playing off, and there’s a great cast around him. It looks like it’s off to a funny start. The show debuts May 29th.
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The King of Staten Island
It’s been a while since we got a new Judd Apatow comedy. His first feature since Trainwreck five years ago stars Pete Davidson as a slacker still living at home, who suddenly has to start being responsible for some young kids. Universal’s trailer for the film paints it as weirdly uplifting… which I have to imagine is not the primary tone of the movie? It heads on demand on June 12th.
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Becoming
Becoming is being pitched as the documentary counterpart to Michelle Obama’s blockbuster memoir. It’s hard to imagine fans won’t find something to enjoy here, though The New York Times said the documentary is less revealing than the book. The film hit Netflix earlier this week.
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I’ll Be Gone In the Dark
HBO has a documentary adaptation of Michelle McNamara’s investigation into the Golden State Killer, and like the book, it seems to pull in McNamara’s obsession around finding the culprit in a big way. The documentary comes to HBO on June 28th.
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Have A Good Trip
Hearing your friends’ stories about being high and laughing at dumb stuff is never as funny as they imagine it’s going to be. But… it might be a little different when it’s famous people telling you stories about being high, and that seems to be what Have A Good Trip is all about. The film comes to Netflix on May 11th.
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The Big Flower Fight
It’s The Great British Bake Off, but with flowers — and that seems like a pretty good recipe. The show debuts May 18th.
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Shirley
Elisabeth Moss plays a take on the horror writer Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, in Shirley. The film comes from Josephine Decker, the director behind Madeline’s Madeline, and it looks similarly dreamy to her previous work. The film comes out June 5th.
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Dreamland
I try not to post too many weird trailers each week, but I had to make extra room for this one, which seems to be a neo-noir gangster vampire movie about a hitman hunting down a jazz musician, if I’m understanding all of this correctly? It comes out June 5th.
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Becky
This is sort of like Home Alone… except the bad guy is a neo-Nazi played by Kevin James.
