1 Summer Of Soul (Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Starting Friday, July 2 in theaters and on Hulu) Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature directorial debut “Summer of Soul,” which took the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance, constructing an account of the summer 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Marcus Garvey Park, a hundred miles south of Woodstock. Concert: rocked. Early viewers: rocked.
2 Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (Opens Friday, July 16) Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”) packs a life of Anthony Bourdain into a feature-length film.
3 The Green Knight (Opens Friday, July 30) A24’s pandemic-delayed fantasy epic, directed by David Lowery and starring Dev Patel as Sir Gawain in an Arthurian retelling. With Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton and Sarita Choudhury.
4 Stillwater (Opens Friday, July 30) Never count out actor-writer-director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “Up,” “Spotlight”), even if it’s a dramatic thriller with Matt Damon as an Oklahoma oil-rig roughneck who relocates to Marseilles to be near an estranged daughter imprisoned for a murder she says she did not commit and to seek her exoneration.
5 Old (Opens Friday, July 23) Everything old is “Old” again, or new, maybe: any bets on M. Night Shyamalan’s latest twist, already reduced not only to a single word but also to three letters?
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
