New Trailers! The Debut, Klara and the Sun, Sheep in the Box, The Dink, Diggers, and Her Private Hell
🎥 Julianne Moore is bitten by the acting bug, Jenna Ortega and Kore-eda explore AI, Jake Johnson enters the pickleball wars, Tom Cruise goes full cowboy, and Nicolas Winding Refn returns.
🎥 “The Debut” Trailer: Julianne Moore Finds Her Stage Voice in Jesse Eisenberg’s Off-Kilter A24 Musical Comedy with Paul Giamatti — Coming Soon
In just four years, Jesse Eisenberg has written and directed three feature films. And after 2024’s sharply observed, character-driven road drama A Real Pain, which earned Kieran Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Eisenberg a Best Original Screenplay nomination, the Social Network star seems to be moving into that rare space where a respected actor becomes just as interesting behind the camera.
Judging by his upcoming third feature, Eisenberg also seems to be getting more comfortable leaning into the odd, funny eccentricities of people tangled up in their own anxieties. Which tracks. We’ve always found Eisenberg genuinely hilarious on press tours, especially when he’s being self-effacing or awkwardly batting back interviewers. So maybe he’s starting to move into a lane once occupied by actor-filmmakers like Albert Brooks, Rob Reiner, or even Woody Allen... Well, strictly speaking of Allen’s neurotic-comedy stylings, not everything else attached to that name, just to be clear.
Yes, Eisenberg just might be our next great neurotic comedy auteur. And we’re very much here for it.
In Eisenberg’s upcoming off-kilter musical comedy The Debut, the actor-filmmaker reunites with Oscar-winner Julianne Moore, following their collaboration on his 2022 directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World.
Here, Eisenberg gives Moore a wonderfully strange role to play: Mona Friedman, a timid suburban woman who stumbles into acting almost by accident, only to have that small creative spark turn into something much bigger, stranger, and possibly more life-altering than she ever expected.
The story follows Mona as she wanders into a local New Jersey community theater and suddenly finds herself cast in an original stage musical. She has little acting experience, little confidence, and not much direction in her day-to-day life. But once the acting bug bites, retreating back into her old routine may no longer be so easy.
Oscar-nominee Paul Giamatti also stars as Jerry, the stern and unforgiving theater director who pushes Mona out of her shell, even as her unlikely transformation begins to stir something more complicated in him. A former actor himself, Jerry appears to recognize the thrill Mona is chasing: that rare feeling of personal victory that comes not from being perfect, but from daring to express something honestly in front of other people.
That seems to be where Eisenberg’s comedy could find its sharpest edge. The Debut is not just about community theater eccentricity or the funny terror of performing in public. It appears to be about the strange emotional pressure that comes with discovering a part of yourself you didn’t know was still waiting to come out.
Rounding out the cast are Halle Bailey, Havana Rose Liu, and stage legend Bernadette Peters, giving the film an interesting mix of screen performers and musical-theater energy as a community theater becomes a pressure cooker and opening night turns into an unlikely act of rebirth.
The Debut looks like it may continue Eisenberg’s fascination with anxious personalities trying to understand who they are when placed under pressure, caught somewhere between self-expression and self-sabotage. Which, as comedy goes, is a pretty rich vein to tap.
The Debut is coming to theaters later this year via A24 Films.
🎥 “Klara and the Sun” Trailer: Jenna Ortega Plays an Artificial Friend Searching for Human Connection in Taika Waititi’s Sci-Fi Comedy with Amy Adams and Mia Tharia — Hitting Theaters October 23rd
The fear of artificial intelligence is usually that it will replace us one day, steal our jobs, and maybe, eventually, take our place in the world. But what if artificial intelligence is simply a girl trying to understand human connection? And what if that girl looks like a wide-eyed Jenna Ortega?
Kiwi comedian, actor, and filmmaker Taika Waititi returns this year with a new heartfelt AI comedy that seems less concerned with tech panic and more interested in why humans need companionship to feel a little less alone.
Meet Klara. She just wants to be your friend.
Klara and the Sun stars Ortega as Klara, an “Artificial Friend” who waits in a store for the chance to be chosen. She believes that somewhere out there is a home where she can finally belong.
That home comes through Josie, played by Mia Tharia, from BBC’s The Listeners, a young girl whose life has been marked by illness, loss, and a complicated relationship with her mother, played by Oscar-nominee Amy Adams. Once Klara enters their world, her bright-eyed loyalty begins to shift the family’s emotional gravity, offering Josie a companion who sees her with unusual clarity.
Klara is less a machine than a witness. She watches, learns, and hopes. And from the looks of it, she may be the key to healing the family she has come to care for.
Ortega appears to be playing against the darker, goth edge that has defined some of her recent work, notably Wednesday and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, giving Klara a curious, open-hearted quality. Think less evil Terminator, more like a lost puppy trying to find a permanent home.
The supporting cast includes Steve Buscemi, Rachel House, and Natasha Lyonne, with Lyonne playing the store manager who introduces Klara as an older model that may be outdated but is still “special.” Or, more precisely, “on special.”
Waititi is stepping into material that appears more delicate than his usual comic-adventure mode. The screenplay is by Waititi and Dahvi Waller, adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name, which shares some emotional DNA with his earlier work Never Let Me Go.
So while Klara and the Sun may be built around the theme of artificial intelligence, it looks far more interested in something deeply human: the desperate need to be seen, chosen, and loved before time expires for all of us.
Klara and the Sun is slated to open in theaters October 23rd.
🎥 “Sheep in the Box” Trailer: Filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda Explores Grief, Family, and a Robot Child in His Tender Sci-Fi Drama — In Theaters July 24th
Okay, not one but two AI films coming soon? There’s something in the air right now, as more filmmakers seem drawn to stories about artificial intelligence and how it might reshape what it means to be human.
But Sheep in the Box looks like a strong example of how different filmmakers can approach this subject from completely different emotional angles.
Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has always been deeply fascinated by the nuance of human emotions and interactions. Films like Like Father, Like Son, Shoplifters, and After Life aren’t just about people caught in difficult circumstances. They’re about how daily routines, quiet gestures, and unspoken feelings reveal who they really are.
Now add a human-like robot boy to the mix, and Kore-eda appears to be pushing that same fascination into a more inquisitive place, using science fiction to examine the fragile bonds that make a family feel real and whole.
Set in the near future, the film follows Otone and Kensuke Komoto, a married couple still grieving the death of their young son. Otone works as an architect, while Kensuke runs a construction company. Hoping to fill the impossible space left behind, they decide to welcome a humanoid robot into their home as their child.
Haruka Ayase and Daigo Yamamoto star as the grieving couple, with Kuwaki Rimu playing the infant humanoid robot who looks identical to the son they lost.
Written and directed by Kore-eda, Sheep in the Box sounds less like a cold piece of speculative fiction and more like a quiet emotional study about loss, replacement, and whether love can survive when the person receiving it was built to resemble someone who is gone.
In other words, the question may not be whether this robot boy can become human. It may be whether this family can allow themselves to feel human again.
Sheep in the Box opens in theaters July 24th.
🎥 “The Dink” Trailer: Jake Johnson Enters the Pickleball Wars in Apple’s New Sports Comedy with Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, Andy Roddick and Ben Stiller — Coming July 24th to Apple TV
To be totally honest, pickleball wasn’t something we heard about until maybe a few years ago. But like all sports phenomena, it tends to sneak up on you before suddenly feeling like it has taken over every park, gym, and retirement community within a five-mile radius.
And because of that, you know it’s going to ruffle a few feathers, especially for those who think pickleball is only for retirees, weekend warriors, or people who find tennis a little too demanding.
Enter Jake Johnson’s Dusty Boyd, a cocky tennis pro who thinks pickleball stinks and wouldn’t be caught dead holding one of those little paddles, let alone admitting the sport might actually be fun.
But after an on-set accident, Dusty finds himself with a battered ego, a derailed career, and no choice but to enter the very pickleball world he once treated like a punchline. Worst of all, he just might become the sport’s unlikely savior when tennis elites pick a turf war with the paddle-wielding underdogs.
That’s the setup for The Dink, a new sports comedy built around the very specific, very competitive world of pickleball.
Directed by Josh Greenbaum, of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar fame and written by Workaholics
comedy writer Sean Clements, the film follows Dusty as he tries to save a struggling club while also earning the respect of his deeply pro-tennis father, Chuck Boyd, played by none other than Ed Harris.
So, yes, beneath the goofy sports rivalry, there appears to be some bruised-ego father-son business happening too, as Dusty finds himself defending a game he once dismissed in a winner-takes-all battle of the courts.
The supporting cast includes Mary Steenburgen, along with Patton Oswalt, Chloe Fineman, Chris Parnell, Aaron Chen, tennis star Andy Roddick as himself, and Ben Stiller as Dr. Stone, the doctor who prescribes pickleball to Dusty as part of his rehab.
The Dink premieres July 24th on Apple TV. So don’t forget to grab a paddle and keep that serve underhand.
🎥 “Diggers” New Teaser: Tom Cruise Gets the Career-Retrospective Treatment in New Preview for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Dark Satire — In Theaters October 2nd
When it was first announced that Tom Cruise was teaming up with Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Diggers, the internet immediately locked onto the obvious question: is this finally Cruise’s big Oscar play?
Cruise has earned four Oscar nominations over the course of his career, and with an honorary Oscar arriving this year, the bigger question is whether Diggers could be the film that finally puts a competitive statue in his hands.
Now comes a new teaser for Diggers, and wouldn’t you know it, the whole thing leans right into Cruise’s long history of memorable screen performances while suggesting this next one could be something closer to a full-on career showcase. Maybe even a culmination of everything he has spent decades proving he can do.
Or maybe the message is simpler: sure, we’ve seen Tom Cruise before, but we haven’t seen him quite like this. This looks like Cruise without the safety harness. Cruise with the charm dialed up and the ego running hot. The cruise control has been switched off as this is Cruise uncaged.
Either way, consider us interested.
In Diggers, Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, a powerful and deeply eccentric cowboy figure whose actions trigger a disaster with potentially world-ending consequences. He is soon forced to prove he is humanity’s savior before the catastrophe he helped set in motion destroys everything around him.
The film is being described as a dark satire in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, seemingly taking aim at the way the richest and most powerful people in the room often turn out to be the most reckless, careless, and dangerously self-assured.
Whether Diggers becomes Cruise’s long-awaited Oscar moment remains to be seen. But if the teaser is any indication, the film is handing him exactly the kind of oversized, volatile, ego-driven role that awards-season conversations love to chew on.
Diggers hits theaters October 2nd.
🎥 “Her Private Hell” New Teaser Trailer: Nicolas Winding Refn Returns with a Neon-Soaked Nightmare Starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton - In Theaters July 24th
Here’s some trivia for ya: filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is color blind. Yup, it’s true. And yet, his films might be some of the most visually electric works in modern cinema, drenched in neon, shadow, and violent bursts of color that somehow feel less like realism and more like a fever dream glowing in the dark.
As a filmmaker who doesn’t see “mid-colors,” Winding Refn has turned that limitation into a kind of visual superpower, pushing his films toward bold contrasts that make every image feel dangerous, seductive, and slightly unreal.
That’s something to keep in mind while watching the new teaser trailer for Her Private Hell, his latest neon-soaked thriller, which arrives bursting with bold color, striking imagery, and an energy that feels both hypnotic and treacherous. No matter how it turns out, it may end up being one of this year’s most visually arresting films.
The film marks Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, following his television work on Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy. It also premiered Out of Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it earned less-than-glowing reviews from critics. Which, honestly, sounds about right. Refn’s films tend to be unconventional, highly stylized, and more than a little divisive.
The film’s setup runs on pure nightmare logic. A futuristic metropolis is swallowed by a mysterious mist, and that fog brings something deadly with it. Companion’s Sophie Thatcher stars as Elle, a troubled young woman searching for her missing father as the city around her becomes more dangerous and less stable by the minute.
Her path eventually crosses with Private K, played by Beef: Season 2’s Charles Melton, an American GI on a desperate mission of his own. He is trying to rescue his daughter from Hell, which is the sort of sentence that tells you this probably isn’t going to be a tidy, grounded thriller. After all, it’s a Nicolas Winding Refn film, and we shouldn’t expect anything remotely normal.
Co-starring Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Diego Calva, Dougray Scott, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada, Hidetoshi Nishijima, and Parker Sawyers, Her Private Hell is scheduled to open in U.S. theaters July 24th through NEON, while hitting international markets, including the UK, Ireland, and Latin America, in September through MUBI.
