New Movies to Watch This Week: Treat Yourself to ‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’ or Adam Sandler’s Latest Trick

Peter Debruge
·9 min read

Halloween and politics are just two of the major themes onscreen in a month that offers a flood of brand-new movies on streaming services and VOD. October naturally brings its share of pre-Halloween horror movies, even when movie theaters are closed (and also a Halloween-themed Netflix comedy, “Hubie Halloween”). Hulu released Clive Barker adaptation “Books of Blood,” which features fresh entries in the vein of the scaremeister’s popular short story anthology, and Amazon Prime launches Welcome to the Blumhouse, shrewdly packaging four of the low-budget horror studio’s not-slick-enough-for-theaters picks into a streaming event. The program launches this week with “Black Box” and “The Lie.”

But this isn’t just any October. Weeks before an all-important presidential election, politically engaged filmmakers are swooping in to sway undecided voters. That explains the surprise release of Alex Gibney and company’s “Totally Under Control,” which looks at the failure of the U.S government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Two liberal-minded Sundance docs — “Aggie,” about philanthropist Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice fund, and “Luis, Siempre,” about Lin Manuel Miranda’s immigrant father — also drop this weekend, while “Pray: The Story of Patrick Peyton” gives faith-based audiences an option.

Also premiering is “Yellow Rose,” the story of a Texas teen whose undocumented mother is arrested and returned to the Philippines, leaving the young woman — who’s just starting to pursue her dreams of being a country singer — to fend for herself in the U.S. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Radha Blank’s hilarious (yet poignant) “The Forty-Year-Old Version” focuses on a woman whose playwriting career has stalled, motivating her to freestyling rap music instead. Where the young folks throw down disposable rhymes, she’s lived enough to have some perspective, and she’s not shy about expressing it.

Here’s a rundown of those films opening this week that Variety has covered, along with links to where you can watch them. Find more movies and TV shows to stream here.

New Releases in Theaters

A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen)
Distributor: Signature Entertainment
Where to Find It: In select theaters now
Despite featuring some of the best actors of their respective generations, this feels like a film born of profound creative exhaustion. It is a retread of territory Allen has extensively covered before, but while the same can be said about almost all of his late-career work, seldom have the gears ground quite so loudly, and never before has the writing felt this chronically out-of-phase with the era it depicts. The protagonists are Gen Y/Z bright young things, inhabiting an apparently contemporary America, yet they model behavior that would be fustily out-of-date if they were in their late fifties, in the late 1950s. — Jessica Kiang
Read the full review

Time (Garrett Bradley)
Distributor: Amazon
Where to Find It: In theaters now, coming to Amazon Prime on Oct. 16
Sixty years. That’s how long a Louisiana judge sentenced Rob Richardson to serve for armed bank robbery. Garrett Bradley covers more than a third of that term in “Time,” and the cumulative impact — boiled down into an open-minded and deeply empathetic 81 minutes — will almost certainly rewire how Americans think about the prison-industrial complex. Bradley interweaves the day-to-day struggle of Rob’s seemingly tireless wife Fox Rich in the present with nearly two decades of home movies that Rich recorded over the span of her husband’s incarceration, which define the unconventionally structured result. — Peter Debruge
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Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, Suzanne Hillinger) CRITIC’S PICK
Distributor: Neon
Where to Find It: In drive-ins now, with virtual cinemas to follow on Oct. 13 and Hulu on Oct. 20
That timing tells you everything about what Gibney hopes to achieve: The goal isn’t to be definitive so much as influential, without compromising the facts, which Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to obscure. By the looks of it, the biggest obstacle wasn’t the virus but Trump. As former federal vaccine chief Rick Bright puts it, “It’s not easy to come forward in this administration.” Therein lies the problem with fast-tracking a documentary like this, since so many of the inside observers who would be willing to go on the record once Trump is removed from office are for the moment chastened by fear of repercussion. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

Yellow Rose (Diane Paragas)
Distributor: Sony Pictures, Stage 6 Films
Where to Find It: In theaters now
Watching this story of a Texas-based Filipina teen with a hankering for country music underscores that there are a lot of colors we don’t see in films about the Lone Star State, most of which focus on the white end of the spectrum. Like Andrew Ahn’s “Driveways” earlier this year, “Yellow Rose” is ultimately a film about kindness. The world can be cruel, but the film’s characters tend not to be. Group those movies with Sundance prize winner “Minari,” and audiences have three terrific indies about growing up Asian in America — although this is the only one that sets the experience to music. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

New Releases on Demand and in Select Theaters

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (Jim Cummings)
Distributor: Orion Classics
Where to Find It: Available in theaters and on demand
Someone — or something — is killing young women in the sleepy town of Snow Hollow. The situation is worse than that, actually: The insidious lupine assailant rips off their limbs, separates their heads, and leaves a gaping hole where their most intimate parts ought to be. Ghastly as that sounds, “The Wolf of Snow Hollow” treats these murders as a joke. Or more accurately, it treats them as the setup for a uniquely uncomfortable sitcom of sorts, one that’s less concerned with solving the case than it is with showcasing the odd mix of characters tasked with investigating the crimes. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

Exclusive to Amazon Prime

The Lie (Veena Sud)
Where to Find It: Amazon Prime
In movies and TV, covering up a crime, even one as drastic as murder, is as common an occurrence as sneezing. “The Lie” is all about a coverup, but Jay (Peter Sarsgaard) and his 15-year-old daughter, Kayla (Joey King), are hiding a crime that doesn’t feel like a crime. They’re hiding a freak accident as if it were a crime. And thus it becomes one. “The Lie” is one of eight films produced by Blumhouse which are set to be released this year on Amazon Prime as a collection under the title “Welcome to the Blumhouse.” But these movies aren’t horror roller-coasters. They’re lower-key thrillers bound together by themes of family, and by the diversity of the talent behind them. — Owen Gleiberman
Read the full review

Black Box (Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.)
Where to Find It: Amazon Prime

Available via HBO Max

Charm City Kings (Angel Manuel Soto)
Where to Find It: HBO Max
“Charm City Kings” is an earnest coming-of-age story about a Baltimore 14-year-old named Mouse (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) torn between joining the Midnight Clique, an extreme dirt bike crime gang in stormtrooper-esque shiny white breastplates, or becoming a veterinarian. While that setup might make eyes roll, it’s inspired by the 2013 documentary “12 O’Clock Boys,” in which an actual kid wrestled with those same options. The film’s truly ridiculous plot choices — the phony twists that make you leave the theater feeling like you’ve inhaled a tank of carbon monoxide — are its own invention, bolted onto a likable, if formulaic, charmer. — Amy Nicholson
Read the full review

Siempre, Luis (John James)
Where to Find It: HBO Max
You need only read the most potted of biographies to know that Luis Miranda is an accomplished man: a plucky, never-say-die Puerto Rican immigrant who arrived in New York as a teen and rose to become a major political consultant. A devoted, misty-eyed documentary portrait of the 66-year-old, “Siempre, Luis” covers all this in brief, but is also aware that most regard its subject’s most notable accomplishment as fathering a certain actor-composer-playwright named Lin-Manuel. Across 94 minutes, “Siempre, Luis” attempts to accommodate both perceptions, even as the one slightly undermines the other. — Guy Lodge
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Exclusive to Hulu

Books of Blood (Brannon Braga)
Where to Find It: Hulu
When it comes to low-budget horror movies, even the good ones tend to slip by unnoticed, which probably explains why “Salem” creators Brannon Braga and Adam Simon were drawn to a brand name like Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood” to package their otherwise generic Hulu horror anthology. Less a proper feature than the ersatz pilot for an open-ended number of future installments, this three-part scare-fest uses the flesh-flaying title chapter in Barker’s 1984 short-story omnibus, “The Book of Blood,” to frame two lesser entries with no relation to the beloved pulp collection. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

Exclusive to Netflix

The Forty-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank) CRITIC’S PICK
Where to Find It: Netflix
Is the world ready for “The 40-Year-Old Version”? Judging by writer-director Blank’s mic-drop debut, the answer’s most assuredly affirmative. It’s affirmational, too, but not in a watered-down or obsequious kind of way. Shot in expressionistic black and white, like earlier indies “She’s Gotta Have It” or “Go Fish,” Blank’s first feature is an earnest, honest, often hilarious testimonial from a gifted writer (the Off Broadway play “Seed” earned her a shot at working with Spike Lee) about what it means for someone in her position to reinvent. The gestation may have been long, but hallelujah, a star is born! — Peter Debruge
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Hubie Halloween (Steven Brill)
Where to Find It: Netflix
Existing fans only need apply: Sandler’s work for Netflix has evolved to a level as industry-proof as it is critic-proof. Yet the broad — in multiple senses — reach of “Hubie Halloween” suggests that fanbase spans a few generations. Essentially throwaway family entertainment with as much faint sexual innuendo as can fit under a PG-13 ceiling, the film offers up Sander’s once-signature gross-out shenanigans in obligatory fashion. Nobody’s breaking a sweat here, but even on autopilot, Sandler’s mugging is sort of exhaustingly impressive on its own terms. — Guy Lodge
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