Monday new releases: 11 August 2025

While there are plenty of aspects of Freakier Friday — sequel to the 2003 smash hit which was itself a remake of a 1976 hit that pro­pelled Jodie Foster to star­dom — that seem to have been grown in a Disney Channel labor­at­ory, it jus­ti­fies its own exist­ence well enough.

Mother and daugh­ter from the earli­er film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, are now grand­moth­er and daugh­ter, joined by grand­daugh­ter (Julia Butters as Harper) and soon-to-be step-sister (Sophia Hammons as Lily) with all four char­ac­ters exper­i­en­cing the magic body swap that teaches them les­sons about empathy and belonging.

Lily is a snobby English-Philipino new arrival at Harper’s Los Angeles high school. When their social fric­tion turns into some­thing requir­ing a parent-teacher con­fer­ence, Harper’s single-mom Anna (Lohan) meets Lily’s wid­owed dad Eric (Manny Jacinto) and romance blooms — to the hor­ror of the two teens.

Eric wants he and Lily to join Anna’s exten­ded LA fam­ily — includ­ing Curtis as Tess, the psy­cho­lo­gist grand­moth­er, and easy­going grand­dad Ryan (Mark Harmon) but Lily wants to live in London where she can flit to Paris Fashion Week and become a fam­ous design­er. When a multi-hyphenate for­tune tell­er (Vanessa Bayer) con­jures up a spell that bodyswaps the teens for the grown-ups, Lily and Harper real­ise they can use this situ­ation to their mutu­al advant­age — break up the rela­tion­ship between their par­ents and go back to how things were.

This sets the scene for the usu­al hijinks that allow all the per­formers to set aside their dig­nity and have fun at each other’s — and each other’s generation’s — expense. It’s not par­tic­u­lar subtle but act­ors love doing this stuff and it shows on the screen. And there are cross-generational short­cut ref­er­ences — pod­cast­ing, pickle­ball — to ensure that every­one feels seen.

By the end, les­sons have been learned and selfish atti­tudes have been cor­rec­ted. There are a few emo­tion­al moments there and what it deliv­ers, it actu­ally earns.

Freakier Friday is writ­ten, dir­ec­ted and edited by women — women of col­our, too — and I found myself won­der­ing why there’s been no equi­val­ent story told for men and boys. I’m no gender expert but it seems to me as if men don’t go through the same dis­tinct chapters of life that women do — 36-year-old men aren’t dra­mat­ic­ally dis­tinct enough from 16-year-old boys, at least not enough to make it either hor­rible or funny. Whereas, women from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions have had genu­inely dif­fer­ent life exper­i­ences — age­ing is dif­fer­ent for women.

Yesterday’s double-feature included a couple of “how did you get so old?” moments. Mark Harmon plays what I’m sure is meant to be an ideal­ised hus­band and grand­fath­er fig­ure — keep quiet and stay out of the way — but he’s dressed in shirts and suits that are slightly too big for him, mak­ing him look strik­ingly eld­erly when you remem­ber his dash­ing per­sona in Chicago Hope and NCIS.

And the pres­ence of an unre­cog­nis­able Amy Madigan in Zach Creggar’s Weapons sug­gests to me that his film exists in an expan­ded Field of Dreams uni­verse. The nature of the super­nat­ur­al phe­nomen­on switch­ing from good-natured fam­ily heal­ing to evil voo­doo magic shouldn’t be at all sur­pris­ing to any­one who has lived through the inter­ven­ing decades.

Weapons is an enter­tain­ing con­coc­tion, although it seems to have been reverse-engineered to reach a par­tic­u­lar wild con­clu­sion – an amaz­ing sequence, cred­it where it’s due – rather than deliv­er suc­cess­fully on its early premise. In a small town that could have been called Normalville, an entire class of middle-schoolers goes miss­ing (apart from one). They all got out of bed at 2.17 one morn­ing and walked off into the night, nev­er to be seen again.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Suspicion falls on teach­er Julia Garner, whose past beha­viour and cur­rent tend­ency towards drink­ing heav­ily alone marks her out as someone with ques­tions to answer. But we soon dis­cov­er that every­one in the town seems to have some troubles they would rather were kept secret, includ­ing con­tract­or Josh Brolin, rook­ie cop Alden Ehrenreich and junkie Austin Abrams.

Weapons is anoth­er flawed crowd-pleaser in a week full of them.

Every time The Friend gets into trouble, dir­ect­ors Scott McGehee and David Siegel get them­selves out of it by cut­ting to the soul­ful eyes and express­ive ears of Bing the Great Dane, play­ing Apollo, willed to New York writer Naomi Watts when his own­er, a great American author played by Bill Murray, passes away suddenly.

Watts is not allowed to keep pets in her rent-controlled apart­ment but re-homing a beast that size is far from easy. As the struggle to live with a mourn­ing anim­al the size of a shet­land pony goes on, along with Watts’ own grief over the loss of her best friend, we see the import­ance of com­pan­ion anim­als for our men­tal health and theirs. It’s not a par­tic­u­larly pro­found obser­va­tion but the dog will melt your heart and that might be enough.

Riviera Revenge is a ter­rible title but the ori­gin­al French N’avoue jamais (Never Confess) isn’t much bet­ter. (It’s from a 1960s pop hit that plays over the clos­ing cred­its so will be mean­ing­ful for the French boomers who the film is aimed at.)

André Dussollier plays a retired army General who loves his fam­ily — at least he thinks he does — and dotes on his grand­chil­dren. While con­vert­ing his loft into a play­room for them, he dis­cov­ers a par­cel of love let­ters to his wife (Sabine Azéma) but they are not from him. About 40 years earli­er, while he was on man­oeuvres and she was a lonely young moth­er, she had a fling. Outraged at this attack on his mas­culin­ity, he decides to go and pay this scoun­drel a vis­it and mete out some justice. Except that, at his age, justice met­ing isn’t all that easy.

What we get is an ami­able – French word – farce – anoth­er French word. It’s the kind of high concept French com­edy that used to get remade reg­u­larly by Hollywood – I can ima­gine De Niro in the Dussollier role and Susan Sarandon as his wife — but when it reaches for some emo­tion­al beats it hasn’t earned them. It’s trite – not a French word.

The Pickup is a noisy action com­edy that nearly killed sev­er­al crew mem­bers a couple of years ago and noth­ing about it jus­ti­fies the risks they took. Eddie Murphy plays a secur­ity guard on the cusp of retire­ment and Pete Davidson is the rook­ie part­ner he’s been assigned. Their mis­sion is to travel across New Jersey pick­ing up cash from banks and get Murphy home in time for his 25^th wed­ding anniversary din­ner. A crim­in­al gang led by Keke Palmer has oth­er ideas and, in a plot point that was also used in the first of the Den of Thieves films, the tar­get is not the cash but the truck itself.

Davidson appears to be have been told that, if he isn’t going to be acted off the screen by Murphy, he needs to play everything at max­im­um and when Murphy rises to com­pete, we are left with sound and fury sig­ni­fy­ing nothing.

Another in a long list of star-driven, high-concept, under-cooked, Saturday night stream­ing offers, The Pickup has been developed and green­lit by people who have no idea what makes films work but have pock­ets so deep that they think it doesn’t mat­ter. And maybe it doesn’t? Maybe the busi­ness aspect of these pro­duc­tions works for every­one involved? They just don’t work for an audience.