New trailers: Knives Out, Jumanji: The Next Level, and more

With New York City’s libraries dropping access to Kanopy last week, I found time to squeeze in one more movie the service carried that I hadn’t seen elsewhere: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, an odd film based on a mistaken real-life theory that a woman found dead in Minnesota had been hunting for the fictional treasure from Fargo.

It’s a great one-line premise that very much made me interested in seeing the movie. But it turns out that centering a film around a character who’s strange enough to mistake a fictional film for a real event makes it very challenging for that character to also be thoughtful and compelling enough to lead a quiet, emotional movie.

It makes the rest of the film feel unfortunately one-note, because Kumiko’s motivations are bizarre and shallow. The film is gorgeous to watch, though — the cinematographer who shot it went on to do Green Room, 20th Century Women, and Green Book.

Check out seven trailers from this week below.

Knives Out

After making the biggest, highest-stakes movie of his career (or basically anyone’s career), Last Jedi director Rian Johnson has moved on to something much smaller in scale: an Agatha Christie-style caper film that has a group of people locked up in a mansion as a detective investigates a potential murder. It comes out November 27th.

Jumanji: The Next Level

2017’s reboot of Jumanji came out just days after The Last Jedi and still managed to make a ton of money. So this year, Sony is doing it again, with a sequel going up against the final Star Wars entry just a few days later in December. Enjoy The Rock’s Danny DeVito impression.

Wu-Tang: An American Saga

Hulu’s latest TV adaptation is… The Wu-Tang Clan. The group’s history is being turned into a drama, and it looks like a fascinating way to explore the struggles of black families in 1990s New York City. The show starts September 4th.

The Righteous Gemstones

HBO has a new comedy coming up about a totally inept, confused, and corrupt family of televangelists. With Danny McBride as one of the stars, you can imagine how it plays out. The show starts August 18th.

Spies in Disguise

Spies in Disguise has Will Smith voicing a super-slick spy who gets transformed into and stuck as a pigeon. I want to hate it, but the premise works really well with someone who plays cool and confident as well as Smith in the leading role. It comes out on Christmas.

The Terror: Infamy

AMC’s The Terror is a horror anthology series based (loosely) around historical events, and it’s about to return for its second season. The new episodes focus on the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and uses that atrocity to tell another horror story of its own. The series returns August 12th.

Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein

Is this real? Does it matter? It’s a good trailer.