The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) | Tyler Nilson & Mike Schwartz

September 2, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

Zack Gottsagen is a young man with Down syndrome who is persistently trying to escape from his care facility in order to go meet his idol, a professional wrestler named the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Curch), who runs a wrestling school in Florida, hoping to fulfill his dream of becoming a pro wrestler himself. Along the way from the shores of North Carolina, he meets a wayward neer-do-well named Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), who is on the run after practically destroying the business of a local crab fisherman. Meanwhile, a woman who works at the care facility named Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) is tasked with tracking down Zak before he gets himself into further trouble, leading to a conflict between Zak’s quest to meet his idol, Tyler’s desire to help him while avoiding his comeuppance, and Eleanor’s quest to do what her employers ask without making things worse for the resident she cares for.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

August 5, 2019August 5, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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Hattie (played by Vanessa Kirby) is an MI6 agent on a mission to keep a deadly virus named Snowflake, which can liquefy the internal organs of humans who contract it, from getting into the hands of a faction of mercenaries under the employ of an evil tech-based organization called Eteon, led by Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a hi-tech assassin with technology-augmented senses that make him a swiss-army knife of deadly skills, something seen by the company as the future of a humanity soon to die off. In a desperation move, Hattie injects the virus into her own body, giving her only 3 days to get it back out before it actually does what it’s supposed to do, and instantly making her the most sought-after fugitive in the world by bad guys and good guys alike. Hired to find Hattie before Lore finds her first is the titular bickering team of Los Angeles-based single father and retired DSS agent Luke Hobbs and ex-special ops mercenary Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the latter of whom is soon revealed to be the estranged older sibling of Hattie. But to save Hattie, they also need to secure the services of a genius scientist, who is perhaps the only one with the technology necessary to extract the virus back out of Hattie, making him a target of Eteon’s forces as well. David Leitch directs this comic spin-off from the Fast & Furious franchise.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) | Terry Gilliam

April 10, 2019April 18, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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Film-maker Terry Gilliam has finally made it to the finish line with his seemingly quixotic quest to make a film version of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, decades in the making. Adam Driver is the main star, playing a hot-shot hothead director named Toby, who is attempting to shoot a commercial in Los Sueños (aka, “The Dreams”), Spain with elements of Miguel de Cervantes’ epic, “Don Quixote”. He’s been down this road before, a decade prior, shooting it as a low-budget student film when he was humble and first getting his taste of the movie-making business. He had the perfect Don Quixote for his film, a show repairman named Javier (Jonathan Pryce) that he discovered and had to mold into some sort of actor. Now, many years later, Toby sees the aftermath of what he left behind in the small village he once shot in, finding Javier now actually thinking he is the true Don Quixote. What’s worse, he believes (and truly insists) that Toby is his squire, Sancho Panza. From there, fiction becomes fact, as Toby finds himself on a wild ride in trying to corral Don Quixote to sanity, all the while he himself begins to question his own grasp on reality with a series of adventures that may or may not be a fantasy of his own.

Triple Frontier (2019) | J.C. Chandor

March 17, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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After a nearly five-year hiatus from writing and directing films, J.C. Chandor re-emerges with Triple Frontier (for Netflix), in which five ex-military special ops soldiers reunite in order to stage a heist of a murderous major South American drug lord. Oscar Isaac is the de facto leader of the quintet, playing Santiago, who decides to “get the band back together” for one last mission for reconnaissance for the government to take down the elusive drug lord he’s spent years trying to take down, Lorea, but changes the mission once he discovers that they could do the bust themselves, take out the human vermin the world is better off without, and score the millions of dollars in cash within his jungle-hidden, well-guarded mansion. Each of the men find that their service for the country hasn’t exactly resulted in the country taking care of them financially, so they figure they should get what’s fair for their years of sacrifice, making it worth their salt to commit to. Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal co-star in this action/adventure/thriller.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) | Dean DeBlois

February 2, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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Hiccup is now into adulthood, young but now the leader among the Dragon-rescuing Vikings of their island fortress village of Berk. Though the Vikings have lived in Berk for generations, Hiccup soon sees that they’ve outgrown their small island, especially with the overcrowding of the Dragons there as they rescue more of them, eyeing the mythical sanctuary on the edge of the world to guide these magical beasts. Meanwhile, love may be in the air, with Hiccup perhaps on the verge of marriage with Astrid, though she seems reticent, and Toothless perhaps finding a mate with a female Dragon very much like him, dubbed a “Light Fury” due to its alabaster color, in contrast to Toothless’ obsidian appearance. Unfortunately, it’s all a trap set by Grimmel, the notorious hunter of Night Fury dragons, who aims to snuff them all out at any cost.

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) | Joe Cornish

January 31, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING involves a young boy in London named Alex, who spends his days bullied at school, primarily because he sticks up to those bullies – Lance and Kaye – to protect his bullied friend Bedders. In the heat of one of those skirmishes, Alex stumbles upon a ‘sword in the stone’ like the one in his book on King Arthur left to him by his absent father, and he manages to pull it out from the concrete block that had been its home. Knighting Bedders with it, the boys are soon visited by a teenage representation of Merlin (he claims to age backwards), who is lost in time and newly in disguise as one of their schoolmates. Merlin gets Alex up to speed about his quest to save humanity from enslavement from the coming of the dormant but powerful witch Morgana within four days (when a solar eclipse will happen), and that he’ll need to raise an army of his friends, and enemies, to become the king of legend. Joe Cornish writes and directs. Features Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Angus Imrie, Rebecca Ferguson, and Patrick Stewart.

Leave No Trace (2018) | Debra Granik

January 10, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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Ben Foster’s war vet Will, widower father to the young teenage girl with the boy’s name of Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), is suffering from some sort of Post Traumatic Stress from his time in the service, living out in the woods, completely off the grid, roughing it in that public park in Oregon. Director Debra Granik combined these elements with the story of a man who raised his daughter off the grid in their own cabin in Oregon, wanting her to learn from nature and books rather than live her whole life in a world of conformity, though she did have exposure to those elements in her time of custody with her mother, as well as in her teen years, when she went to a high school and became more interested in conforming to society.

Bumblebee (2018) | Travis Knight

January 6, 2019April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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This time out, the character of Bumblebee ends up going back to his original look from the toy line and cartoon series of a Volkswagen Beetle, when he arrives on Earth back in 1987 as part of a last-minute escape plan for the Autobots on Cybertron to find an inhabitable planet as theirs is about to be destroyed in an all-out civil war with the Decepticons. Bumblebee ends up emerging in California, where his dormant state of the Beetle laying in rust in a junkyard, in hiding after being hunted by Sector Seven (the government agency who first discovers him), draws the eye of a troubled teenage girl named Charlie Watson, who views the car as freedom and an opportunity to follow in her recently deceased father’s footsteps by repairing two damaged precious things – the car, and herself.

Aquaman (2018) | James Wan

December 21, 2018April 19, 2019 ~ Vince Leo

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The setting starts sometime in the 1980s, where we find Atlantean queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) coming up to the surface in the state of Maine to get away from an arranged marriage, seeking a bit of sanctuary and time to heal in a lighthouse run by a human named Tom Curry (Temuera Morrison). The two unlikely partners fall in love, eventually leading to a son, Arthur Curry. The kingdom of Atlantis is not pleased with Atlanna’s apparent defection to the land, sending out their soldiers to claim her back, culminating in Tom being left alone to raise the boy himself as a human, except one with the powers of Atlanteans in his DNA, including an ability to talk to and command all forms of marine life.

We fast forward to Arthur’s adulthood, known to the land-dwellers as “The Aquaman” after a series of public acts of heroism, one including taking down pirates that includes future nemesis Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mareen II). However, Arthur has to become a savior to his adopted people when the current rule of Atlantis, Arthur’s half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), is looking to mount a war with the land walkers who continue to pollute the oceans, seeking the assistance of King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren), one of the leaders of the ‘seven seas’ needed to approve. Nereus’s daughter Mera looks to recruit Arthur’s assistance in staving off the uprising from his brother’s charge. Arthur must go undersea to make his presence felt, but the opposite of a fish out of water in his new environs in the Atlantean realm, especially when the situation boils down to a mano-a-mano battle between Arthur and Orm on his home turf (or non-turf, as it happens to be).

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

November 7, 2018November 7, 2018 ~ Vince Leo

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Mackenzie Foy stars as Clara, suffering through grief with her father and two siblings during their first holiday without her recently deceased mother, Marie. Clara receives an enigmatic and ornate Christmas gift, the last from her mother, a metallic contraption shaped like an egg with an elaborate keyhole that came with no key that might fit accompanying it. She is despondent that she cannot open it without ruining it, and it causes her to be depressed during the big holiday gala put on by her godfather, Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman). who, it turns out, had created the egg for her mother. During the events of the evening at Drosselmeyer’s mansion, she follows a string that will lead to Drosselmeyer’s own gift to her, way out from the party and into another dimension, to a mystical and magic-fueled world called the Four Realms.