This week you've got a lot of options—including The Princess Bride, Kevin Spacey as a cat (don't choose this option), and a super-rare 35mm print of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter.
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
The film achieves the same high-pitched, broad humor of the series—even though at a scant 90 minutes, Ab Fab: The Movie is straining at the seams. While you may wonder, “Why was this made?” the hilarious presence of Joanna Lumley is reason enough. Her character Patsy is a stroke of comedic genius, and the world is always in dire need of that. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY Cinema 21.
Attack the Block
Executive produced by Edgar Wright—the guy behind Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Spaced, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—first-time director Joe Cornish’s debut is fantastically clever and relentlessly funny. Like all great monster movies, it’s got bit of social commentary slyly poking its head out from the shadows; if you can see past the mangy, jet-black fur and phosphorescent fangs of Attack the Block’s aliens, you’ll find a fair amount to think about. But—again, like all great monster movies—if you’d rather just roll with it, and simply have a better time in a theater than you’ve had in entirely too long? That works too. Part of the Top Down: Rooftop Cinema series. ERIK HENRIKSEN Hotel DeLuxe.
Bad Moms
Since Bad Moms is a film about women made by the men who wrote The Hangover, it’s motherhood through bro-colored glasses: Drinking sequences, the word “vagina,” and blunt-force impact are mined for laughs, and just as modern moms are hamstrung by a lack of paid maternity leave and gender double standards, the film’s potential for revenge-flick fun or bawdy escapism is curbed through shallow sentimentality. KJERSTIN JOHNSON Various Theaters.