New trailers: Queen & Slim, The Irishman, 1917, and more

There’s been a ton of talk about how Quentin Tarantino plays with history in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But the thing about the movie that most fascinates me its structure: it is, quite frankly, kind of bizarre.

As the film starts, you’re waiting for the drama to hit — but it never really does. You just keep waiting and waiting, and eventually, you realize, that’s what the movie is: just a long, slow series of moments with these characters as we get to know them. We all know where this is heading, the film seems to be saying, and it makes you wait for it all to pay off.

I’m not sure of anything else quite like it, other than maybe a book. Tarantino has always worked with novelistic techniques like chapters and flashbacks, so that’s not necessarily a huge surprise. But I don’t know that it works quite as well here as he hoped. Ultimately, we really do just wanted to get to where the movie is going.

Check out nine trailers from this week below.

Queen & Slim

If you watch one trailer this week, make it this one. There’s a new trailer out for the absolutely gorgeous, emotional, and generally incredible-looking debut feature from Beyoncé collaborator Melina Matsoukas, which was written by Lena Waithe. It’s a very different take on a police shooting story that puts a black couple on the run after one of them kills an officer during a struggle at a traffic stop. It comes out November 27th.

The Irishman

Netflix paid big for Martin Scorsese’s latest gangster film, which stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, spans decades of history, and is about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. It looks very much like a Scorsese gangster film, but the only thing anyone’s going to be talking about is the de-aging CGI done on De Niro’s face for certain parts of the movie, which is very carefully hidden away in this trailer until the very end (I certainly have a guess as to why). The movie comes out this fall and will play in theaters as well as online.

1917

Sam Mendes’ first film since Skyfall is a tense looking and beautifully shot World War I film that sends two soldiers racing through battlefields to deliver a message in an attempt to save hundreds of lives. It opens in limited release on Christmas.

Undone

I just watched A Scanner Darkly again for the first time in probably a decade, and it really felt like there had to be a better use of rotoscoped animation — Undone might just be it. Just watch the trailer, it looks very cool. The show comes to Amazon on September 13th.

The Lighthouse

The director of The Witch is back with another quiet, gorgeous, and extremely eerie film. The Lighthouse seems to mostly be about some men going mad on a small island where they tend to a lighthouse. It comes out October 18th.

Mindhunter

The first season of Mindhunter was not exactly great, and yet somehow I watched the whole thing. It looks like season two might finally go somewhere with all of the mystery the show had been setting up. We’ll find out in a couple weeks, when it debuts on August 16th.

Little Monsters

Lupita Nyong’o stars in this ridiculous twist on a zombie film, which has her looking after a group of kindergarteners amid a very bloody zombie outbreak. It comes out in the UK on November 15th.

Sanditon

As you all know, this column is home to The Verge’s premier Pride & Prejudice (2005) fan club, and as a courtesy, that fandom extends to all other Jane Austen adaptations as well. This pop-music filled trailer is for a PBS and ITV adaptation of Sanditon, a novel that was unfinished before Austen’s death. It comes out some time next year.

Los Reyes

These are good dogs. (And actually this looks really cool.)