Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer Fighting Over Austin Butler

And other June 2024 watches

Austin Butler in The Bikeriders.

The Bikeriders
New release

If Challengers is about not letting your husband keep you away from your man, The Bikeriders is about not letting your wife get between you and your boys. It’s thin on plot and high on vibes — a reporter trails the highs and lows of a Midwestern motorcycle gang in the 60s — but the movie’s inciting action, climax, and denouement are all someone barking, clapping, running in place, tongue out of their mouth and down some stairs, mushroom bomb forming where their brain should be so they can appropriately awooga at Austin Butler being hot. Butler is so hot that his wife (played by Jodie Comer) and his gang’s ringleader (played by Tom Hardy) really fight over who gets to spend more time with him, a kind of cuckoo, low-states conflict. 

Kinds of Kindness
New release

A triptych of oddball fables from Yorgos Lanthimos. The first is a kind of cuckoo Severance meets Ella Enchanted: Jesse Plemons is a corporate drone whose existence is shaped by his boss. The second (maybe my favorite) is a beguiling allegory of love and deception, a gory kinda-sorta Phantom Thread: Emma Stone plays a missing (stranded in the woods) woman who is rescued and returned to her cop husband, played by Plemons. Or was she? As the husband, Plemons is consumed by missing his wife, and then convinced that the woman who has returned to him is actually an imposter. In the third, Emma Stone drives around a Mustang, tries to convince her sex cult to take her back, and auditions actresses of a certain age to see if they can bring the dead back to life. The last one never comes together in the end, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that features Plemons the least. Plemons slides between noir-ish desperation (the first story) and paranoid, practiced insouciance (the second) so well. A fabulous kicker from the goat Justin Chang: “And so, as it slogs toward the finish, does Kinds of Kindness manage to cough up its last and perhaps most useful lesson: when life gives you Plemons, make Plemons aid.”

I didn’t even need a photo here I just got a kick out of adding the Hung Up treatment to this image.

Real Housewives of New York Season 6
First time watch

It’s not hard to imagine what drove Aviva Drescher, a woman who has three degrees and no job history but tells everyone what they should be doing with their careers, to get worked up enough to throw her prosthetic leg across the Manhattan restaurant Le Cirque: The rent was due. Aviva was never additive, her presence did not rise to the threshold of necessary. Only a stunt could keep her on this show. What was it that Hilton Als said about Maggie Rogers when he dared to say it? “Fame is the dominant impulse.” And so Aviva Drescher arrived to Le Cirque with medical records so bogus they were lifted from the game Operation