The Week in Culture (August 14th)
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Hot Ticket Nobody 2 Bob Odenkirk returns as the lifelong assassin turned family man who now finds his summer vacation interrupted by a local drug ring and a corrupt smalltown sheriff (Colin Hanks). The 2021 film was the COVID spring’s brightspot. By all accounts, this entry is the perfect way to send off the summer movie season. Now playing in theaters.
Pamphleteers’s Pick Americana Tony Tost of Longmire and Poker Face fame makes his feature directorial debut with this ensemble western noir about a rare Native American artifact that captures the hearts and minds of a small town’s residents, including Sydney Sweeney as waitress with country music aspirations and Halsey as a single mom of a reincarnated preteen Sitting Bull. Not only is the movie endlessly engaging, but Tost’s clear admiration for America’s non-coastal regions shines through in every frame. Check back next week for our interview with Tost and actor Paul Walter Hauser about this instant American classic. Now playing in theaters.
For a complete list of upcoming titles, check out the 2025 Film Guide.
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Pavements (Mubi) Fans of the eccentric 90s indie rock legends have plenty to ponder in Alex Ross Perry’s hybrid of documentary and sendup of the bloated Hollywood biopic. Stranger Things’s Joe Keery turns in stellar work as a fictionalized version of himself playing lead singer Stephen Malkmus while Perry’s execution of a fake Pavement museum and Broadway musical make for the type of ingenious comedy to which Borat always aspired.
Dragnet (Prime) TV’s pioneering cop show from Jack Webb maintains a higher level of grit and murky ethics than any of its predecessors. For those decrying the decay of our once-great metropolises, this one’s for you.
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King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation Scott Anderson, the mind beyond 2013’s brilliant T.E. Lawrence tome, Lawrence in Arabia, returns with his expansive and exhaustive take on the Iranian Revolution and the disastrous American foreign policy that culminated in the Carter years and continues to reverberate throughout the Middle East. Anderson will appear at Parnassus Books tonight for a reading and discussion of the book at 6:30 pm.
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Tennessee Lightening Ashley Monroe The Knoxville native and Pistol Annies member offers up the best album of the year so far with her return to recording after beating a rare form of blood cancer in 2021. Amid the rollicking classic country throwbacks, collaborations with legends like Marty Stuart and T Bone Burnett, and the occasional synth, Monroe gets back to her roots with the definitive rendition of gospel staple “Jesus Hold My Hand” featuring Armand Hutton.