Beach vacations, tragic romances, a living legend, and more.
Movies are back in full force this summer, and June feels like the month the floodgates break. There’s action comedies! Experimental documentaries! Sexy European romantic tragedies! Horror flicks! In the Heights is coming out and so is Zola. Plus a new Pixar movie and an animated film about a chainsaw-wielding George Washington leading a team to fight Benedict Arnold. Get ready, friends.
Here are a dozen of June’s most interesting films to look for in theaters or on streaming platforms.
All Light Everywhere
Release date: June 4
We undeniably live in a surveillance society. Cameras are ubiquitous, from body cameras on cops to drone-enabled cameras that capture views from above to the phone cameras we hold in our hands every day. But what do cameras miss? Do they really give us a more objective view of reality? Those are the questions Theo Anthony (Rat Film) tackles in All Light, Everywhere, a sprawling essay film about “blind spots” in the technologies we trust (or don’t trust) to keep us safe and the illusions they too often depend upon. Watching All Light, Everywhere is informative, but more importantly, it’s an experience — and a sobering one.
How to watch it: All Light, Everywhere will premiere in theaters.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Release date: June 4
The latest installment in the Conjuring universe (and a direct sequel to 2016’s The Conjuring 2) returns to paranormal investigative couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga). The Warrens were real people, and just like other movies from the series, this one draws on their files for its source material. Some of the story in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is expected — a little boy exhibits weird behavior, and the Warrens are convinced it’s a case of possession. But the film also covers the first court case in US history in which a murder suspect used demonic possession as a defense. If the previous Conjuring films are any indication, The Devil Made Me Do It will be taut and spooky.
How to watch it: The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It will premiere in theaters and stream on HBO Max.
Undine
Release date: June 4
Christian Petzold, one of Europe’s greatest living filmmakers (Transit; Barbara), returns with Undine, which transports an ancient mythological creature into the present day. In European mythology, an “undine” is a water nymph who falls in love with a man, but will die if he is unfaithful to her. In Undine, a (modern-day) historian who studies the urban development of Berlin falls in love with a man, but he betrays her — and she must kill him and return to the water. It’s stylish, passionate, and full of enchantment.
How to watch it: Undine will premiere in theaters.
In the Heights
Release date: June 11
In the Heights is poised to be the smash hit of the summer — and that would probably be true even if it wasn’t perfectly timed to welcome moviegoers back to theaters after a long pandemic year. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (pre-Hamilton) musical was a hit on Broadway, and now it’s been translated to the big screen by Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu. Starring a bevy of talent — Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, Olga Merediz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Gregory Diaz IV, Stephanie Beatriz, Dascha Polanco, Jimmy Smits, Marc Anthony, and Miranda himself — it’s a joyful, music-filled story about a community pulling together and their dreams of a better life.
How to watch it: In the Heights will open in theaters and on HBO Max.
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard
Release date: June 16
As you may have deduced from the title, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a sequel to the 2017 comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard, in which Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) must protect hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) from a bunch of pretty bad dudes. Everyone’s back for the new film, including Darius’s wife Sonia (Salma Hayek), who drags Bryce — who’s been on a sabbatical, at his company’s insistence — back into the fray. Will it be kind of stupid? Probably. But Jackson, Reynolds, and Hayek all have proven comedy chops, so it’s also likely to be the platonic ideal of a mindless summer blockbuster.
How to watch it: Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard will open in theaters.
Luca
Release date: June 18
Pixar’s latest is set in the Italian Riviera, a place I’d give my eyeteeth to vacation in right about now. The film is a coming-of-age story about a kid named Luca, who’s about to have the best summer of his life in Italy. He meets another boy and they become fast friends. But Luca has a secret: He’s actually a sea monster. What? I don’t know, but it sounds fun to me.
How to watch it: Luca will premiere on Disney+.
Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It
Release date: June 18
Living legend Rita Moreno is one of the most highly decorated actors in American entertainment, and her success spans decades: Her first major award was the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for West Side Story in 1961. (She’s also one of the few actors to ever accomplish the elusive EGOT — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.) But more importantly, she’s an absolute icon, a woman who blazed trails for Latinas — Moreno is from Puerto Rico — with determination, commitment, and skill. In this documentary, she tells her story, from the good times to the hard times, and it is absolutely delightful.
How to watch it: Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It will premiere in theaters.
Summer of 85
Release date: June 18
French director François Ozon makes entertaining, passionate melodramas, and Summer of 85 is no exception. The drama — which premiered at the virtual Toronto International Film Festival last fall — is about a 16-year-old named Alexis (Félix Lefebvre), who is spending his summer at a seaside resort in Normandy. He meets David (Benjamin Voisin), and they fall into a relationship that quickly becomes a romance. But tragedy is always lurking around the edges. Summer of 85 is a coming-of-age story, and if you’re up for some sexy French summer fun and emotional implosions, this is it.
How to watch it: Summer of 85 will premiere in theaters.
F9
Release date: June 25
You don’t go see a Fast & Furious movie for the plot; you go for the cars and the camaraderie, and that’s what F9 promises to serve up as well. Directed and co-written (with Daniel Casey) by Justin Lin, who also made Fast & Furious 6, F9 has been delayed several times due to the pandemic. But now it’s here, with a stacked cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren, and Charlize Theron. Presumably, there will also be really cool stunts.
How to watch it: F9 will open in theaters.
False Positive
Release date: June 25
Broad City’s Ilana Glazer co-wrote False Positive with director John Lee, and it’s a spin on Rosemary’s Baby. Glazer plays Lucy, who has been trying to get pregnant with her partner Adrian (Justin Theroux), with little success. Then they find a fertility doctor they love, Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), and hopes run high. But when Lucy becomes pregnant, she starts to suspect something is afoot with Dr. Hindle and sets out to investigate. A spooky horror film about pregnancy? Sounds great to me.
How to watch it: False Positive will premiere on Hulu.
Zola
Release date: June 30
I am reasonably confident that Zola (which premiered at Sundance in 2020) is the first movie based on a Twitter thread, and it is a humdinger. In 2015, dancer A’Ziah King — who goes by Zola — told the story, in 148 tweets, of a strange but true trip to Florida with a girl named Stefani; the trip went terribly, terribly wrong when King discovered Stefani’s “roommate” was actually her pimp. King later admitted that some parts of her account were exaggerated, but Zola director Janicza Bravo is less interested in facts than she is in crafting an entertaining tale and exploring how our perceptions of the characters are affected by who’s telling the story. It’s wild, raunchy, and very funny, with a cast that includes Riley Keough, Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun (a.k.a. Succession’s Cousin Greg), and a marvelous Taylour Paige, plus a screenplay co-written by Bravo and Slave Play writer Jeremy O. Harris.
How to watch it: Zola will open in theaters.
America: The Motion Picture
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Netflix
Release date: Wednesday, June 30
This movie sounds very wild, which is probably the idea. It’s kind of a revisionist history of America, helmed by Archer executive producer Matt Thompson; George Washington (voiced by Channing Tatum, who’s also one of the film’s producers) leads a team to take on Benedict Arnold and King James, and Washington, uh, wields a chainsaw? Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of Lego Movie fame are among the film’s producers, and the voice cast is full of top-flight talent, probably because everyone’s been stuck in lockdown for a year. In addition to Tatum, listen for Simon Pegg, Judy Greer, Bobby Moynihan, Amber Nash, Killer Mike, Andy Samberg, Jason Mantzoukas, Olivia Munn (who, I need to point out, is playing Thomas Edison), Raoul Max Trujillo, Will Forte, and more. The film is slated to come out just before the July Fourth weekend, so I guess it’s time to celebrate.
How to watch it: America: The Motion Picture will premiere on Netflix.
The demand that people with a platform “speak out” on every issue feels misdirected.
A couple of days ago, I saw a TikTok that began as a callout toward creators who were too busy posting goofy videos to speak out on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then, abruptly, the video stopped, cutting to another user.
“You guys want @Spencewuah?” the second user asked, referring to an example of the type of popular creator the original video was calling out. “What is he gonna say of any fucking substance about the most pressing current event going on right now? If people want to educate themselves they should go to real fucking sources anyway,” she said. “Do you guys even care about the issue or do you care about influencers caring about the issue?”
It reminded me of a discussion that I’d been seeing a lot on TikTok about the way social media has given us the expectation that every video, every tweet, every take needs to be a 100 percent irreproachable statement and encompass the lived experiences of everyone who might read it. “The way this app makes us act like teenagers need to have PhD-level expertise on every single topic is crazy,” was the gist of one TikTok I saw months ago and haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
The same is true, evidently, for influencers. Beyond constant calls in comments sections from their followers to speak up on political issues, even other celebrities have joined the chorus. Earlier this month, the rapper Noname called out famous people who’d stayed silent on the latest phase of the conflict.
It’s a natural inclination to demand action from the most privileged. The problem is that this desire for others to say something — anything! — feels misdirected. One anonymous beauty influencer told the UK fashion magazine Grazia that she’d received DMs from followers telling her they were “disappointed” that she hadn’t spoken up to advocate for Palestinians. She’d read the news but said that to share exactly what she was reading might be considered patronizing to her audience — or worse, end up spreading misinformation. As a woman of color, she also remembered her frustration last summer when non-Black creators kept chiming in about Black Lives Matter. “I didn’t want to be one of those people in this instance,” she said.
After enough pressure, however, she shared a link to a news article. That still didn’t satisfy her followers. They told her that “the media wasn’t to be trusted” and sent her other resources instead.
Would there have been a “right way” for a celebrity or influencer who is otherwise unconnected to the Israel-Palestine crisis to “speak out”? I’m not entirely sure. As Habiba Katsha writes in the Independent, “Forcing a group of people who haven’t expressed an interest in social issues to post political content can encourage performative allyship. If influencers are only posting political content because they’ve been told to, it means they’re posting out of obligation rather than desire, which is performative.” She contrasts this to, say, Bella and Gigi Hadid, who as half-Palestinian women have been able to draw on their personal experiences to be vocal about current events. (After they attended a pro-Palestine rally in New York, the Israeli government condemned their actions as anti-Semitic.) Israeli actress Gal Gadot also drew backlash for her tweets in support of her home country.
Many celebrities who have made statements have faced immediate backlash. For weeks, Mark Ruffalo had made clear that his pro-Palestine remarks had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but after extended pressure, he walked back his original criticisms of Israel. Rihanna, meanwhile, was accused of “All Lives Mattering” the issue when she wrote on Instagram that her “heart was breaking with the violence I’m seeing displayed between Israel and Palestine.”
The number of people who believe celebrities should “stay out of politics” and the number of those who believe that they should speak up on every platform available is about even, at 29 percent and 28 percent, respectively, according to a 2018 poll from Morning Consult and the Hollywood Reporter. Gen Z and millennials are more likely to say that a celebrity speaking out would influence how they vote in an election.
Yet the value of these statements should be considered as much as whether the statements should exist at all. For the most part, influencers exist because we like looking at them, their lives, their homes, and their clothes, and not necessarily their ability to articulate nuanced debates. Just as we should be suspicious of any big business that weighs in on political issues, so too should we be of celebrities, because ultimately both are beholden to their own economic success.
Rather than share empty infographics on Instagram or make grandiose statements with little action to back them up, a better way the wealthy could use their platforms is by sharing what, exactly, they’re doing in support of their causes. Reminders from influencers that they engage in activism, that they give a certain percentage of their income to charitable causes, that they volunteer and support their local mutual aid groups, can normalize these activities to the point where more people feel as though we should be regularly incorporating them into our lives.
But I don’t know that the demand for influencers to speak out on complex political issues is entirely about the issues themselves. It feels more like a test: Am I, as a fan, justified in having this parasocial relationship with you? Who are you, anyway? Should I be uncomfortable with how much attention we’re all giving you?
I can’t help but feel the inevitable anger is similar to what happens when a certain type of always-mad-online person reads a news article about a celebrity wedding or a new fashion trend or, I don’t know, TikTok influencers. They’ll unleash their frustrations over the fact that too much media attention is spent on frivolous-seeming topics and lash out at the writer (“Why don’t you cover something actually important for once?” is a reply every culture reporter repeatedly gets on Twitter). It’s the same kind of misdirection — there are clearly thousands of other reporters covering the topics that said reader has deemed “actually important,” reporters who are far more knowledgeable and well-sourced on such things. Do you really want to read a heady explainer on a new health care bill written by me? Of course you don’t!
Celebrities, in other words, should not be the moral compasses of the masses. We have other people who are supposed to be doing that — for example, political and spiritual leaders who are beholden to us as citizens rather than as consumers. To the extent that those people aren’t doing their jobs is a problem with a solution: Demand better from them, instead of unloading in a beauty influencer’s Ins
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Higher education may not be doomed, but it’s in trouble.
The pandemic hit almost every industry hard, but few were hit as hard as higher education.
Times were already tough for many American universities, mostly because of declining enrollment numbers and weakening financial support from state governments. The pandemic accelerated these trends and forced colleges — especially smaller private colleges and a ton of midlevel state schools — to gut their budgets and lay off workers to offset revenue losses.
As we emerge from this pandemic, it’s worth asking what will become of higher education in America. And if the situation is as dire as it appears, should students — and parents — seriously rethink the value of college?
To get some answers, I reached out to Kevin Carey, who covers higher education for the New York Times, to talk about the state of American colleges. We discuss the student debt crisis, why the pandemic is impacting institutions in wildly disparate ways, what kinds of schools are facing extinction, and if he thinks the future of higher ed in America will look anything like its past.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Is there an actual crisis in American higher education?
Kevin Carey
Parts of it are facing a crisis. It’s an enormously diverse system with lots of institutions serving different people and goals. If you’re a wealthy university that enrolls wealthy students, times are still pretty great. If you’re a small private college with a small endowment that lives year to year on tuition, these are really tough times. If you’re one of those mid-tier public universities, particularly in states that have pulled back on funding, things are bad.
New undergraduate enrollment is down by about a million and a half students from the peak in the late aughts, which was a high-water mark. We’ve seen income growth remain pretty stagnant for everyone except the well-off, and there just aren’t as many students, and families don’t have enough money to pay tuition. There’s been a real sea change in social attitudes toward debt, and people are (rightly) worried about it.
So, yeah, from a pure business standpoint, a lot of colleges are having a hard time making the numbers add up — and that will continue to get worse.
Sean Illing
What about larger, more prestigious public universities in states that value higher education?
Kevin Carey
They have problems, but public universities in states that support higher education are doing better. Historically, support for higher education has been a fairly bipartisan or nonpartisan thing in this country. But that’s changed as the electorate has been bifurcated along education and class lines.
You can see this after the Great Recession. That was an enormous hit to state budgets. Every state cut funding to its higher education system; one, because they didn’t have as much money, and two, because in recessions, states always disproportionately cut university budgets because universities can raise prices, whereas K-12 schools and prisons can’t. The difference is that some states — like New York and California — put money back into the system as their budgets recovered. Other states, like Louisiana or Pennsylvania, that historically have done a bad job of funding higher ed didn’t put money back in, and those are places that are really struggling.
Sean Illing
Was the pandemic a bigger hit on higher ed than the Great Recession?
Kevin Carey
We really don’t know yet. The effects of the Great Recession unfolded over the course of five years or so, mostly because the public revenues didn’t snap back for a long time. Traditionally, college enrollment is kind of cyclical. People get laid off and then they’ll go back to get a credential in order to improve their value in the labor market and also because they have the time.
The pandemic recession was different because it was so fast and so severe, but also weird and unique and it happened so fast. People were going back to school when they were’t ready to go back, and so most of it was online. It was a mess. But things definitely look bad for a lot of colleges right now since enrollment is declining.
Sean Illing
There are lots of private colleges that are in really dire straits. How many do you think are facing extinction?
Kevin Carey
It’s a good question. Coming up with a precise number is hard, but it’s not a tiny number. Just based on publicly available financial information, you can see that plenty of schools are in danger of going out of business in the next five years or so. Even in the years leading up the pandemic, there has been a steady drip of small private colleges just going bankrupt.
A lot of these schools have actually weathered the last year better than I would’ve expected. Overall employment in the higher education sector is down about 15 percent, so I think a lot of institutions took the crisis as an opportunity to lay off people they probably wanted to lay off anyway. I hate to use the phrase “trimming fat” to describe people losing their jobs, but that’s what schools have done to reduce their labor costs.
They were also very aggressive about trying to get people back on campus last fall, even when it ran counter to the best interests of public health. But they live and die by enrollment, so they were very adamant about getting people back through the doors. Whether this has a permanent effect on enrollment, I think it’s a little hard to tell at this point.
Sean Illing
Does reducing “labor costs” basically mean firing teachers and gutting liberal arts or humanities problems?
Kevin Carey
We don’t have those kinds of numbers. Colleges weren’t spending that much money on these things to start with, because not that many students enroll in the humanities. Most of the enrollment is in business, the social sciences, education, and health. There aren’t that many history majors anymore, not like there used to be, anyway. You can hire a history teacher for nothing in the market now because it’s absolutely saturated with people that have the credentials to be college professors. The academic labor market was in a real crisis before the pandemic. Everything that’s happened in the last year has made it worse. I think the hiring will probably accelerate the trend to more contingent faculty, particularly if this big shift to online education continues.
Sean Illing
One thing I wonder about is whether the current model can last for much longer, especially in light of the student debt crisis. If people are continually forced to acquire mountains of debt in exchange for the promise of upward mobility, do you feel like we’re going to hit some kind of tipping point where the costs of a degree don’t match the market value and it’s just not feasible for non-wealthy people to attend college anymore? And if that happens, what becomes of higher education?
Kevin Carey
I think the tipping point is more on the institutional side. If people are no longer willing to pay money to certain kinds of colleges, then those colleges will decline and fail. But it’s not that they won’t go anywhere; it’s just that they just won’t go to those places.
The thing is, we have an enormously complicated and highly structured market where there are massive spaces you simply can’t enter without a degree, sometimes even by law. You can’t be a teacher without a degree. Every occupational licensure process is tied to the higher education system. Our entire health system works this way. If you want to be a nurse, you have to go to college. If you want to be part of the professional managerial class, if you want a well-compensated professional life, a stable professional life, you probably have to go to college. And you’re definitely more removed from an acute employment crisis in this economy if you have a college degree.
So I don’t think higher education is going away, but institutions will fail and the market will have to correct.
Sean Illing
How much of the turmoil in higher ed is due to the complete embrace of the business mode? So many universities have disinvested in teaching and turned college into a post-adolescent consumer experience. Is that a big part of the story for you?
Kevin Carey
Well, there’s only one real model of success in higher education: the academic city-state. It’s the global research university. Everybody wants to be the University of Michigan or something like that. Obviously there’s the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is such a strange and esoteric place. What you really want to be is a big, successful, prosperous institution that has all kinds of smart people and beautiful buildings and sports teams and grassy lawns and football games on Saturdays and social prestige and everyone makes enough money to have a nice little house where they can ride their bike to work. That’s the model of a successful university.
But this is very much a zero-sum game, and everyone’s trying to get there at the same time. There are only so many upper-middle-class students to pay full tuition to support your lazy river and your science center. So there can only be so many University of Michigans. I think a new report came out yesterday that says that private colleges now provide on average about a 54 percent discount against the published tuition price. And that number is going up every year. So they’ve just kind of exhausted their pricing power.
If universities play this game and lose, they end up in a tough spot. What we need, from a societal and policy standpoint, is most institutions not trying to be University of Michigan. There shouldn’t be 2,000 research universities in this country. What we need is probably like 300 great research universities and 1,700 universities that are mostly there for teaching. But if status is about research and teaching is just something that you do because you have to, and so therefore you do it as cheaply as possible with basically an indifference to quality, that’s not good for anyone. Including the institution. But that’s where we are right now.
Sean Illing
What do you think higher ed looks like in a decade? Does it even resemble its current form?
Kevin Carey
Lots of institutions that exist today will be gone. There will continue to be attrition and bankruptcy on the private side, probably mergers on the public side. Because almost all the institutions in the bottom half of the distribution of resources and prestige are going to face enormous challenges in terms of their cost structure and the related issues of declining enrollment and a decline in pricing power.
I suspect the long-term trend of more online students will continue as it has for many years. Even before the pandemic, 35 percent of college students were taking at least one online class, and something like 15 percent were totally online. That’s all going to continue. I think you have a relatively small number of institutions that will succeed at that at scale, but most of the colleges that exist now will still exist. Colleges are very resilient historically.
Sean Illing
At what point should students and parents seriously reconsider the value of higher education altogether?
Kevin Carey
I think they should think deeply about the value of all of their choices in higher education, because there’s an enormous amount of variance in value. Not all colleges are the same. They don’t charge the same amount of money, they don’t provide the same experience, and your odds of graduating are very different depending on what institution you enroll in.
I guess the last thing I’d say is that college has become very high-stakes both from a price standpoint and a value standpoint. So no one should wait to think hard about the value of higher education. The moment is now to take a hard look at all of the choices and not believe all the promises that colleges make. Because they’re making them in their own interest, not in yours.