The 2025 summer movie season, brought to you by the big brains at Hollywood’s no-risk-too-small multinationals, could be called Attack of the 60-Foot White Men. Tom Cruise’s latest (last?) Mission Impossible action extravaganza hijacks Memorial Day weekend, followed by Brad Pitt’s high-octane vroomfest F1: The Movie (June 27), James Gunn’s sky-high Superman (July 11) starring David Corenswet (who?) and Akiva Shaffer’s high jinxed Naked Gun (August 1) with Liam Neeson in Leslie Nielsen’s shoes (why?).
Locally, the cash-squeezed nonprofit San Francisco Parks Alliance canceled its signature outdoor summer series, Sundown Cinema. In a pinch, you can always take your tablet, a blanket and a friend to Dolores Park on a foggy evening and watch the locally set flicks D.O.A. or 48 Hrs. or Mrs. Doubtfire or The Game. Or check out the touchstone film festivals carrying on for another summer without the Castro. See you somewhere at the movies!
A still from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo,’ 1958. (Tenderloin Museum)
Profit-panicked studios are packing the multiplexes with low-rent horror this summer. There’s nothing like a drop of terror-laced sweat inching down one’s spine, but I’m partial to the taut classicism of a certain English pervgent. The Balboa chose eight of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-loved films — Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Vertigo among them — and three lesser works, serving up roller-coaster triple bills on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. If the fog doesn’t put you in the mood when you arrive, it will when you leave.
Aud Mason-Hyde in a scene from Sophie Hyde’s ‘Jimpa.’ (Mark de Blok)
San Francisco’s pioneering LGBTQ+ film festival celebrates its 50th edition next year. There have been brief periods in the last half-century when “live and let live” was the national mood, and a Frameline screening could just be a movie. Not now. The festival opens with Sophie Hyde’s earnest family drama Jimpa, with Olivia Colman and nonbinary actor Aud Mason-Hyde crashing the Amsterdam lair of gay father/grandfather John Lithgow. Sam Feder’s hard-edged documentary Heightened Security (June 20) follows the ACLU challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans adolescents. To put it bluntly, Frameline is the most crucial event on the summer film calendar.
‘Elio’
Opens June 20, 2025
In the beginning, aliens (or extraterrestrials) were super-smart, technologically advanced beings who, depending on what they had for breakfast, could subjugate humans or destroy Earth with a snap of their extremities. Pixar Animation Studios has made the remarkable discovery — right there in Emeryville! — that, in fact, the other denizens of the galaxy are as feckless, error-prone and comical as our own species. (Don’t tell a soul!) The Disney subsidiary applies this scientific breakthrough to a tried-and-true narrative device (an 11-year-old is unexpectedly called upon to represent the human race to the galaxy, and proves up to the task) with predictable results: boffo box office, and complaints that voice actor Yonas Kibreab is a DEI hire.
Gene Hackman in a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation,’ 1974. (Courtesy of the Roxie)
Union Square gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel had a marvelous inspiration last year: He asked his roster of top-drawer visual artists to select their favorite films, with the series drawing crowds to the Roxie. The second edition includes all-time San Francisco greats The Conversation (July 11, chosen by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller) starring the late Gene Hackman and Terry Zwigoff’s astonishing Crumb (July 16, chosen by Sophie Calle). The lineup is littered with unexpected treasures from around the globe such as Dorothy Arzner’s acerbic pre-code gem Merrily We Go To Hell (1932), Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (1958) and Yasujiro Ozu’s The End of Summer (1961). There are few things more stimulating than art and artists in dialogue.
Efrat Tilma in a still from Udi Nir and Sagi Bornstein’s ‘The First Lady.’ (Courtesy of Jewish Film Institute)
The SFJFF programmers have an impossibly difficult job. The October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and the ongoing annihilation of Gaza and Palestinian civilians by Israel have shocked and splintered the American Jewish community. Israeli narrative and documentary filmmakers, a perennial festival source of timely, high-quality work funded in part by their government, are scrambling. Yet movies always offer an opening — to listen, to see, to talk — for willing audiences. With that mantra, the programmers are in the process of compiling the lineup. The First Lady, documenting transgender activist Efrat Tilma’s return to Israel while the reactionary, ultra-Orthodox-supported Netanyahu government wields power, will surely provoke discussion.
‘Eddington’
Opens July 18, 2025
In the heat of the New Mexico summer, the center cannot hold. This pandemic-set (2020, if you forgot/repressed the memory) foray into paranoia from writer-director Ari Aster (Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid) locks and loads the always-volatile Joaquin Phoenix as a small-town sheriff at odds with mayor Pedro Pascal. Fueled by conspiracy theories and (anti)social media, suspicious minds race headlong to the brink. We’ll know if Aster hits the bull’s-eye or explodes into space after Eddington’s Cannes debut.
A scene from H.P. Mendoza’s musical film ‘Fruit Fly,’ 2009. (Courtesy of the Roxie)
Writer-director-composer H.P. Mendoza is the Bay Area’s most uninhibited purveyor of silver screen entertainment. After penning the songs and screenplay for the jaw-droppingly wonderful Colma: The Musical (2006), he handled all the chores for his delirious 2009 follow-up, Fruit Fly. Both films have certified cult status among queer and Asian American audiences, but no demo can resist Mendoza’s enthusiasm for all-shapes/sizes/colors self-expression. Bring your voice, bring an instrument, get down tonight!
Lee Kang-sheng in a scene from Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘The Hole.’ (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
Aug. 14–31, 2025
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
You’ll have to move fast — faster than Tsai Ming-liang’s low-key ambivalent protagonists — to score tickets for the director’s Berkeley visit with his long-time collaborator, actor Lee Kang-sheng. Tsai’s patient urban sketches elevate glamour-drained neorealism to fine art, and the colorless daily lives of his unassuming characters to profound heights. 1998’s The Hole (Aug. 28) views the approaching millennium as more drip, drip, drip of civilization’s spiral down the drain, while 2013’s Stray Dogs (Aug. 30) observes a single father and two children barely staying afloat amid an unceasing Taipei deluge. In the duo’s remarkable body of work, cities — and people — exert a mysterious pull.
Still from Michael Angelo Covino’s ‘Splitsville,’ starring Covino, Adria Arjona, Dakota Johnson and Kyle Marvin. (Neon)
‘Splitsville’
Opens Aug. 22, 2025
Merrily we go to hell, with any luck. American sex comedies post-Lubitsch/Sturges/Wilder tend to disappoint; they dabble in unabashed pleasure for a few hot minutes before zipping up and off to the Puritan wonderland of a PG-13 rating. But what’s summer without, uh, a summer romance? Michael Angelo Covino’s follow-up to The Climb, written with Kyle Marvin and costarring the two of them, imagines the lustful anarchy unleashed when Marvin’s character — unmoored by wife Adria Arjona demanding a divorce — hooks up with his married friends Covino and Dakota Johnson. Fidelity means never having to say you’re sorry, right? Cannes hosts Splitsville’s premiere; at the very least, the red carpet should be a hoot.
Austin Butler in Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Caught Stealing.’ (Sony Pictures)
‘Caught Stealing’
Opens Aug. 29, 2025
Sponsored
Darren Aronofsky’s urban crime thriller sets the hounds loose on the dog days of summer. The hook, for our purposes, is a potential San Francisco treat: The down-on-his-luck ex-ballplayer hustling through lowdown 1990s New York City in Charlie Huston’s debut novel hails from the East Bay. Austin Butler flashes a Giants cap while romancing Zoë Kravitz and dodging danger boys Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio and Bad Bunny. If the hometown nine are still hanging with the Dodgers and Padres in late August, this could be a memorable summer.
lower waypoint
Care about what’s happening in Bay Area arts? Stay informed with one email every other week—right to your inbox.
