Best New Movies This Weekend: Mando, Kill Bill, and More

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It’s a genuinely stacked weekend at the movies — and at home. The biggest story is obviously Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, Disney’s first theatrical Star Wars release in nearly seven years and its first-ever attempt to adapt one of its Disney+ series into a feature film. But whether or not you’re feeling the Force this weekend, there’s plenty else to work with: a creepy van-horror movie made for packed Friday night crowds, a prison drama with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, a Quentin Tarantino epic finally available to stream in its original form, and a Mummy reboot that has some genuinely nasty ideas — and some serious tonal problems.

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Here’s everything worth your time (and a few things that aren’t).

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu — In Theaters Now

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The Mandalorian and Grogu is set after the events of Return of the Jedi, with the evil Empire fallen and Imperial warlords still scattered across the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they enlist bounty hunter Din Djarin — played by Pedro Pascal — and his young apprentice Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. The plot involves rescuing Rotta the Hutt, the muscular outcast son of the late Jabba, who is voiced by The Bear star Jeremy Allen White. Sigourney Weaver and Martin Scorsese also co-star, and Iron Man director Jon Favreau is behind the camera.

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On paper, this should feel like an event. In practice, critics are decidedly split — and even the positive reviews aren’t exactly enthusiastic. Slate’s Sam Adams put it bluntly: \”If The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t the worst Star Wars movie — and it might be — it’s certainly the least: the least essential, the least engaging, the least necessary.\” The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Abele was more generous, writing that \”across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint.\”

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The core criticism keeps coming back to the same thing: this is a feature-length TV episode, not a movie. The onscreen text setting up the story notably skips the iconic opening crawl — that’s reserved for entries with “Episode” in the title — and the film’s structure is repetitive in a way that works fine for binge-watching but doesn’t hold up on a big screen. Jeremy Allen White’s Jabba’s son character apparently gets a scene where he laments, essentially, \”Do you know how hard it is to be Jabba the Hutt’s son?\” — which is either charming or baffling depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing.

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The one genuine bright spot everyone agrees on: composer Ludwig Göransson, a three-time Oscar winner, delivers a score that does heavy lifting the rest of the film doesn’t. When the lead character is masked and Pedro Pascal’s vocal performance is running on limited fuel, Göransson’s music is doing the emotional work.

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The bigger picture here is hard to ignore. The Force Awakens is still the highest-grossing domestic release of all time. That was eleven years ago. Since then, Disney has released dozens of Star Wars shows — the only one that’s broken through culturally in any meaningful way is the Emmy-winning Andor — and a string of planned theatrical films that either fell apart or were quietly shelved, from the Lord & Miller situation on Solo to the abandoned trilogies and Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron. Filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Damon Lindelof have spoken openly about Star Wars projects that didn’t come together. And the franchise’s big theatrical comeback is… a streaming show adaptation whose last season aired over three years ago.

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The Mandalorian and Grogu is rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, and runs 132 minutes. Get tickets here.

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Passenger — Also in Theaters, and Worth Your Friday Night

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If Star Wars isn’t calling your name, the horror movie Passenger is genuinely fun — the kind of thing that’s best experienced in a full theater with a crowd that’s ready to scream.

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The setup is simple: a young couple (Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio) witnesses a brutal highway accident and soon realizes they didn’t leave the crash scene alone. A demonic presence — think haunted house movie, but the house is a van — follows them into their #VanLife adventure. Melissa Leo also stars. Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal directs, and while he hasn’t topped his debut The Autopsy of Jane Doe, this is his most entertaining work in years. The opening sequence in particular is a blast — casually funny, then suddenly tense, with a cut-to-title that apparently had opening-night crowds screaming with delight.

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The weak spots are real: whenever the film slows down for the couple to have earnest conversations about their relationship and ambitions, it drags. These characters are not deeply written. But the set pieces are well-constructed, the jumps land, and there’s nothing wrong with a movie that knows exactly what it is. IndieWire’s Alison Foreman praised Øvredal for being \”skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen,\” while The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee felt the film kept its audience at too much of a distance to fully work.

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It’s rated R for strong violent content, some gore, and language. Runs 94 minutes. Best seen with a full room. Tickets here.

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Wasteman — Rent This One Tonight

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The most quietly impressive release of the weekend isn’t in theaters at all. Wasteman is a tense, suffocating British prison drama that currently holds a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes — and earns every bit of it.

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The film is a two-hander: Taylor, newly paroled and hoping for a fresh start, finds his chances threatened when his new cellmate Dee takes him under his wing — and a vicious attack forces Taylor to choose between protecting Dee and protecting his own freedom. It’s a movie about how the prison system corrupts even those genuinely trying to do right within it, and what redemption can possibly look like in that environment.

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David Jonsson — who broke through with scene-stealing work in Alien: Romulus — and Tom Blyth, known from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the Netflix rom-com The People We Meet on Vacation, are both exceptional here. The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Grierson praised both performances, writing that Blyth \”hints at a whole universe inside his character simply by the way he quietly listens and observes.\” The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey added that Jonsson \”feels like he’s on the precipice of something major\” — which, watching this, is easy to believe.

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Wasteman is available to rent or buy now on Apple TV and Prime Video.

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — On VOD, With Caveats

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The marketing for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has leaned heavily on the director’s name — partly because Blumhouse has been busy on social media reminding everyone that Brendan Fraser is not in this one. (For the record: a fourth Mummy film with Fraser was recently greenlit, which explains the branding gymnastics.) Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise, gets top billing here as he attempts to put his own stamp on familiar IP.

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The premise is genuinely unnerving: a journalist’s young daughter vanishes into the desert, and eight years later, when she’s returned to her broken family, the reunion quickly becomes a nightmare as she begins to transform into something horrifying. That setup — particularly the stretch where the family must try to rebuild their lives after a devastating, unsolved disappearance — is harrowing in a way that works. And the film is impressively mean-spirited when it comes to its gore, including some sequences you likely haven’t seen before.

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The problem is tone. The film lurches between genuine trauma and gross-out comedy in ways that keep colliding, and by the time it pivots into familiar possession-movie territory, the tonal whiplash has worn out its welcome. The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee called it \”absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong, tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary,\” while TheWrap’s William Bibbiani was more forgiving, praising Cronin’s \”uncanny knack for human mutilation\” as practically a requirement for the genre.

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At 2 hours and 15 minutes, it tests your patience. But if you’re a horror completist, there’s enough here — particularly in the first act — to make it worth a rental. Available now on Apple TV and Prime Video.

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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — Stream It on Peacock

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This one’s been a long time coming. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair — Quentin Tarantino’s original, uncut vision of his fourth feature, uniting both volumes into a single nearly four-and-a-half-hour experience — is now streaming on Peacock for the first time, more than two decades after Harvey Weinstein persuaded Tarantino to split it into two films for commercial release.

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The film premiered at Cannes in 2006 and has been a cinephile obsession ever since — it plays regularly at Tarantino’s own Los Angeles theater, complete with French subtitles from that original festival print. This is the first time the full version has been available to a mainstream audience, and it’s everything fans of the film hoped it would be.

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The differences from the two-volume theatrical release are small but meaningful. The transition point between Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 now includes extended dialogue and loses a scene (and a limb). The climactic reveal — originally used as a hook to bring audiences back for the second film — lands where it was always meant to, in the final act. And the legendary \”House of Blue Leaves\” sequence, where the Bride faces the Crazy 88 in the famous black-and-white section, is now in full color and extended, including previously cut moments of maximum carnage. The animated O-Ren Ishii origin sequence has an extra scene, too, and it’s a good one.

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The most striking thing about watching it uninterrupted is Uma Thurman’s performance — commanding, physical, emotionally layered — which was completely overlooked by the Academy during both years the films were eligible. Had they been released as one, it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t have been nominated. The film features one of the most expertly curated soundtracks of Tarantino’s career and some of the most kinetic filmmaking he’s ever done.

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WBUR’s Sean Burns summed it up perfectly: \”Kill Bill is electrifying, frustrating, revealing, impeccably crafted and about as thrillingly, embarrassingly self-indulgent as one might expect from a prodigiously gifted, grown adult man given seemingly limitless resources to make a four-and-a-half-hour movie about a team of sexy female assassins named after poisonous snakes.\”

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It took 22 years. Worth every one of them.

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“category”: “Movies