Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a movie match. Dakota Johnson's new rom-com about a matchmaker, maybe? Or would you prefer a live-action rematch of Hiccup and Toothless? Tom Hiddleston's doing some matchless dancing, and John Wick may have met his match in Ana de Armas. In short, something this weekend to match everyone's taste.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the guys who came up with Lilo and Stitch in 2002, and who also stepped in to save a 2010 animation project about a kid named Hiccup and a dragon named Toothless, are having quite a summer. Both of those creations have now been reimagined in "live action" — which is to say, hybrid, heavily digitized, differently animated — versions that will collectively take in more than a billion dollars while seriously re-energizing toy sales by Labor Day.
Though they are corporate confections at this point, they both center on outcasts and have heartwarming notions at their center. This one is loud, bombastic, a bit too fiery, and decently entertaining as it tells a story about overcoming physical limitations and becoming your own person. It features Gerard Butler as Hiccup's father, Stoick the Vast, whom he voiced in the first film, and 17-year-old Mason Thames as Hiccup (a role Jay Baruchel voiced charmingly but has long since outgrown). Toothless is as charismatic as ever; the flying sequences and natural landscapes are appropriately breathtaking, and if the film is overly enamored of lesser dragons belching fire at incoherently bellowing Norsemen, well, so was the original.
Materialists
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is terrific at her job as a matchmaker for a high-end New York dating service in this provocative rom-com from the director of the ravishing romance Past Lives. Ever on the lookout for "unicorns" — men who are tall, handsome, charming, educated, and successful — Lucy offers her card to random businessmen on the street and, times being what they are, a number of them take her up on her offer to introduce them to someone special.
Near the start of the film, her agency throws her a party to celebrate the ninth marriage she's brokered, and at the wedding for the tenth, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a unicorn who has an eye for her. Her own romantic history being less than stellar, she agrees to go out with him, and who should be their waiter but John (Chris Evans), her ex, who's still carrying a torch. John is tall, handsome, charming, and educated, but he is a struggling actor/cater-waiter who still has roommates, which suggests he falls a little short on Lucy's success metric. The cost-benefit analysis she does for her clients says she should go with Harry. And her heart?
Playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song is intent on capturing the conflicts and doubts that underscore contemporary romance. The glimpses we see of Lucy's clients — both men and women — are often cringeworthy, but also speak volumes about vulnerability in a society where, at some point in your 30s, love becomChris Evanses as much a calculation as a feeling.
The Life of Chuck
An oddly upbeat film about the end of the world, filmmaker Mike Flanagan's adaptation of a three-part novella by Stephen King begins with Chapter 3, where a schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) tries to get his class to parse Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" as they're distracted by news reports. California has fallen into the Pacific, the Midwest is on fire, sinkholes are swallowing whole downtowns, so their distraction is understandable. Less understandable: odd advertisements popping up everywhere with a picture of a guy at a desk and the words "39 Great Years. Thanks Chuck!"
Chapter 2 skips back a bit, and we meet Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a 30-something accountant, as he spies a sidewalk drummer and busts into some spontaneous dance moves (choreographed by Mandy Moore). Chapter 1 takes us back further to his childhood. The moving backwards gimmick is the same one Stephen Sondheim employed in Merrily We Roll Along, and it has much the same effect: the story gets sunnier, but the knowledge of what's to come clouds your reaction.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
This interstitial episode of the franchise that's employed pretty much every stunt double in Hollywood features Ana de Armas training at a ballet school that offers side lessons in Ruska Roma assassination skills. Set between chapters three and four of the John Wick saga, this spin-off's plot is mostly nonsensical, but offers its star opportunities to offer a few hundred opponents death-by: knife, various automatic weapons, flamethrower, and, at one point, dinner-table crockery. Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, the late Lance Reddick (in his last on-screen appearance), and yes, Keanu Reeves also appear. The unwieldy title's a clue to an unwieldy structure, but director Len Wiseman provides mayhem enough to keep fans occupied until John Wick 5 arrives in 2026. There's also an animated prequel in the works. This Wick guy just will not stay dead.
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