So I completely devoured Hacks (fantastic), watched the season four finale of The Handmaid’s Tale (wow) and episode two of Loki (fun!) and I still feel like there are a lot of shows I’m missing? But, I have to sleep sometime. I encourage you to read Emily VanDer Werff’s excellent analysis of Handmaid’s very good fourth season in Vox, this excellent New Yorker piece about what it’s like to be Jean Smart, and Vulture’s insightful recap of Loki ep. 2. I’m now counting the days until the Ted Lasso season two premiere.
We have a lot of strong women in this week’s trailer roundup, along with a music documentary produced and directed by Questlove, a new Titans trailer, and a flick with Nicolas Cage and his pet truffle pig (yet another sentence I never anticipated I would write one day).
LFG
This is the story of the US women’s national soccer team and their fight for equal pay, and just watching the trailer I got angry all over again on their behalf (the title stands for “let’s fucking go”). Despite winning four Olympic gold medals and four World Cup championships, they were still making less than their male counterparts— player Jessica McDonald mentions at one point that her paychecks don’t even cover her childcare. Grr. LFG premieres on HBO Max June 24th.
Summer of Soul
The Harlem Cultural Festival took place in 1969, the same summer as Woodstock, and featured performances by Gladys Knight and the Pips, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, and Stevie Wonder. Yet the festival was largely forgotten, even though it was all captured on film. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson went through 45 hours of never-before-seen footage (that had apparently been left in a basement for 50 years), to tell the story of this musical event in Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), which premieres on Hulu July 2nd.
Gunpowder Milkshake
Lena Headey, Karen Gillan, Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, and Carla Gugino are in this movie about lady assassins, and to be perfectly honest I don’t really need much more plot description, I am totally in. Paul Giamatti also stars in Gunpowder Milkshake, which comes to Netflix July 14th.
The Morning Show
After the way last season ended, with Alex (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) being cut off abruptly after they spill all the behind-the-scenes secrets at their dysfunctional workplace on live television, I wasn’t sure what season two would look like. Well the wait is almost over and it looks like there are plenty more of the plot twists and backstabbing that made me like this show to begin with. Julianna Margulies joins the cast, and Mark Duplass, Billy Crudup, and Steve Carell all return with Aniston and Witherspoon. The Morning Show returns to Apple TV Plus on September 17th.
Titans
The hit series based on the Teen Titans comics returns for season three, which is (appropriately) set in Gotham. Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites) notes in the voiceover that the city “breeds a special class of criminal,” and with Vincent Kartheiser joining the cast as Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow, he may be on to something. Titans season three comes to HBO Max August 12th.
Pig
I honestly do not know what to make of this movie— Nicolas Cage is a former chef who is now a recluse and someone steals his pet truffle pig, so he goes all Liam-Neeson-in-Taken on them. Or as Entertainment Weekly succinctly put it: “John Wick but with a pig.” Our friends at Eater note that truffle-related crimes are a thing, and a scary thing at that, which I did not know. Cage’s delivery of the line “who has my pig?” is not exactly terrifying but it is a bit creepy, so I am fairly confident this is not a comedy even though the trailer has strong “Saturday Night Live digital short” vibes. Pig hits theaters July 16th.