I finally got around to watching Roma the other week. It’s a fascinating film, telling its story in a way that few others do — not quite through the intimate portrait of one character, but through a world of contrasts and colliding events.
Honestly, I couldn’t quite get a grasp on how to understand Alfonso Cuarón’s approach until I saw a tweet from Guillermo del Toro the other day. “In every sense, Roma is a fresco, a mural, not a portrait,” he wrote.
And it’s true. The background of each shot matters as much, if not more, than the foreground, and frequently they’re playing off one another in one big, looping narrative. I do wish the film had gotten closer to its main character, but del Toro’s analogy helps me appreciate its grander design.
Check out 11 trailers from this week below.
Spider-Man: Far From Home
I enjoyed how relatively small and personal Spider-Man: Homecoming stayed for a superhero film — but it looks like Far From Home is taking something of a victory lap, bringing Peter on a tour of cool European locations to set a fight sequence. Skeptical as I am, I do love all the possibilities that Mysterio brings to the story, with this trailer showing the villain pretending to be a straightforward, spotlight-seeking hero. It comes out July 5th.
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum
Here’s another simple movie about a guy named John Wick, his dog, some colorful background lights, an endless supply of guns, assassins on motorcycles, assassins in fancy hotels, more cool lighting… you know what to expect, and every bit of it is packed in here. The third John Wick comes out May 17th.
Game of Thrones
HBO finally has a teaser for the last season of Game of Thrones, and it isn’t revealing a thing. That’s probably for the best given how short this final season will be: there’s just six episodes to go when the season premieres on April 14th.
High Life
I’m not sure I even generally understand the direction High Life, the next film from director Claire Denis, is heading. But it’s pretty clear this is going to be one of the year’s biggest, buzziest, and most provocative sci-fi films, so it’s worth checking out. Plus, André 3000 is in it. It comes out April 12th.
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
Nancy Drew has a longboard. That’s the key takeaway from this first trailer for the reimagined Nancy Drew, which looks like a fun update on the classic detective character. The film comes out March 15th.
Fast Color
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, of Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” stars in this small-scale sci-fi film about a group of women with some world-altering powers. It looks like a really intimate take on a sci-fi / superhero-ish origin story, with this trailer’s impending sense of dread suggesting it’ll end up feeling much bigger than it looks. The film comes out March 29th.
Little Woods
Little Woods has Tessa Thompson playing a woman in a poor, rural American town who turns to selling drugs to support her struggling sister. The film is part crime drama, part family drama, and seems to be dealing with the many systems that can oppress people in impoverished areas. It comes out April 19th.
The Hole in the Ground
A24 has a new horror film coming up that looks kinda like what you would make if you were trying to make an A24 horror film. It’s small scale, in the woods, super moody, and there’s lots of weird stuff going on. It comes out in theaters March 1st.
High Flying Bird
Steven Soderbergh shot another film on an iPhone, following up last year’s iPhone-shot Unsane. Unsane didn’t exactly get high praise for its cinematography, but I guess it’s nice that Soderbergh is having a good time (and, you know, still proving that with enough incredible talent around you, you don’t need a super-expensive camera). High Flying Bird comes to Netflix on February 8th.
Woman at War
Woman at War is Iceland’s submission to this year’s Oscars for best foreign-language film. It’s a ludicrous-looking comedy about a 50-year-old woman who uses a bow and arrow to take down power plants as part of a radical environmental scheme. It comes to the US on March 1st.
Red Joan
Judi Dench plays a suspected Russian spy in Red Joan, which looks across decades of a woman’s life in Britain to explain just what made her into a potential saboteur. It’s a neat narrative approach that lets the film show a lot about the character at once. It comes out in the UK on April 19th.
