The traditional seasonal patterns of movie releases have been upended in many ways over the last several years. Horror movies come out all year long now. The “Summer Movie Season” starts in early May. Each of the last six Best Picture Oscar winners was released prior to November. One thing that feels constant, however, is that the dog days of summer, defined here as simply “August,” is when distributors and studios drop the films they don’t know what to do with on the side of the road. It doesn’t mean these films aren’t good (although they often aren’t), just that the bean counters didn’t want to put them up against more stalwart, franchise-branded competition. This week’s wide releases include an offbeat horror comedy, a slapstick legacyquel, and a kids’ cartoon. They also include the latest effort from a Japanese director who’s increasingly known for more than sharing a name with the country’s preeminent auteur.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made somewhere around thirty features, plus a variety of television shows, shorts, and straight-to-video content, in what’s now a forty-year career. He came to prominence in the late 1990s as part of the “J-Horror” wave with films such as Cure and Pulse, but he’s done plenty of genre-hopping since. His latest, Cloud, centers on Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who makes his living as an online reseller—he seeks out opportunities to buy bulk goods at a discount, then sells them at a markup via online auctions. When a medical equipment company goes out of business, for instance, he takes dozens of therapy machines off their hands and turns a tidy profit. So far, so good, right? He’s simply an agent of capitalism, exploiting market inefficiencies and building a nest egg for him and his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). Having walked away from his factory job, Yoshii’s just trying to get by without submitting to the demands of the system.

And yet, there’s something about the disconnect between seller and buyer in the internet marketplace that brings out the worst in people. (Just ask any eBay PowerSeller.) Some of the swag Yoshii acquires is fake, including a slew of knockoff handbags that provide the extra cash needed for the couple to move into a larger place with more room to store boxes of merchandise. “Being real or fake doesn’t matter,” he tells Akiko. Business is booming. But when the fakery is gradually discovered by his buyers, they band together to find out who’s behind the online tag, “Ratel,” that Yoshii has been using. At this point, Cloud shifts gears, slowly and then all at once, from a portrait of late-stage capitalism survival tactics to a surprisingly violent, blood-soaked thriller.

It’s almost as if Kurosawa the social commentator could only go so far before giving way to Kurosawa the genre stylist, and both halves are nicely crafted. Yoshii’s dawning awareness that his amoral actions may have serious consequences is gripping, and Suda delivers a convincing performance. But the gear-gnashing required to make that sudden left turn kind of throws the brutal third act off kilter. The vexed buyers who converge on Yoshii don’t have much depth, which plays to the film’s thesis that the anonymity and alienation of modern commerce have made us all interchangeable but doesn’t create a ton of dramatic interest. The film’s title may be a reference to the Internet “cloud,” but a better title would have been “Negative Feedback.” (Hollywood Theatre, Living Room Theaters)

Together: Relationship ambivalence has been the inspiration for plenty of comedies (including last week’s Oh, Hi!), but it’s also, unsurprisingly, the basis of a number of horror films as well. Attempting to combine the two, with middling results, is Together, a high-concept fable of sorts about a couple, Tim and Millie (real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie), who move out of the city to a small town so she can pursue a teaching job, even though it means he’ll have a tougher time pursuing his (fading) dreams of rock stardom. Each has a degree of festering resentment, manifested by her hesitant response to his public marriage proposal and his desire to continue wearing King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard t-shirts. It’s a classic, even banal, trope: the girl is ready to grow up and be boring, and the guy can’t quite let go of childish things. Before long, however, neither of them will be able to let go of the other at all.

After a hiking mishap that exposes them to some sort of cursed spring water, Tim and Millie find themselves involuntarily drawn to each other, their very bodies attempting to merge. When they wake up in bed, their legs are briefly stuck together. When they’re separated by distance, they’re drawn against their will to reunite. Writer-director Michael Shanks, making his first feature, flogs the obvious metaphor nearly to death: Being in a long-term relationship inevitably means surrendering at least some (and maybe all) of your individuality and becoming a seamless component of a merged entity. We get it. Taking this to its literal extreme, including a midday tryst in a grade school restroom that includes at least one quick wait-how-did-this-get-an-R-rating shot, Shanks and his game accomplices highlight the inherent creepiness of intimate fleshy contact.

All you philosophy majors out there might be saying, “Wait, Plato covered this millennia ago in The Symposium!,” and that dialogue about love being an expression of a desire to reunite with a long-lost other half does get name-dropped. But John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a much more interesting take. To be sure, there are plenty of impressive, and inventive, body horror effects as the film snakes toward its inevitable conclusion. But ultimately this is a one-joke movie, and the punchline is given away in its (nearly ubiquitous) poster and trailers. Franco and Brie are game enough, but there’s a self-satisfied smirk to their performances that dulls the true horror of their situation. It may earn a place on lists of the best and/or worst date movies, but beyond that it’s a concept that would have better been served as a half-hour short. (wide release)

The Naked Gun: To a certain demographic that came of age in the 1980s, the idea of a new actor playing Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin in Leslie Nielsen’s stead is virtually heretical. The epitome of deadpan, Nielsen’s performances as a bumbling but well-meaning cop in the short-lived TV series Police Squad and the three Naked Gun features that followed were flawless gems of comedy that will never be adequately replicated. That said, this reboot starring Liam Neeson could have been much more of a travesty. Director and co-writer Akiva Schaffer (one third of The Lonely Island alongside Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone) would seem the right man for the job, and he gets the absurdist vibe down much of the time, but the real world intrudes awkwardly at others.

The plot, vestigial as it is, involves a suspicious death in a self-driving car that’s ruled a suicide, much to the chagrin of the dead man’s sister (Pamela Anderson), who convinces Lt. Drebin to investigate further. That draws the interest and ire of the latest specimen of this year’s favorite movie villain, a Muskian techbro played by Danny Huston with the sort of sleazy undercurrent he can muster in his sleep. Of course, it’s all an excuse for a barrage of comedic anarchy, kicking off with a foiled bank robbery that’s basically the film’s trailer intact. Your mileage may vary, of course, but my favorite gags involved a chorus of male voiceovers interrupting Drebin’s interior monologue about Anderson’s figure; an unexpectedly detailed discussion of the Black Eyed Peas; a truly bizarre interlude involving an evil snowman that feels like it comes from the same universe as Too Many Cooks; and a callback to the era of TiVo recordings.

More discordantly, there’s a perhaps inevitable political subtext. First, I don’t recall Nielsen’s Drebin ever killing people, much less in the freewheeling manner Neeson’s does in the opening sequence. Second, Neeson’s character is vaguely conservative-coded, referring to “freedom fries” and his outrage at Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance, and later admitting that, of the dozens of people he’s shot over the years, only one was white. None of these jokes lands well, and the movie seems to grapple with the same conundrum that Samberg’s TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine did in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: how to poke gentle fun at police work without engaging in what’s known as “copaganda.” Here it’s Drebin’s predictably outraged superior officer, played with relish by CCH Pounder, who provides the voice of moral outrage at some of his violent shenanigans.

One true highlight is Anderson, taking full advantage of her acclaimed comeback turn in The Last Showgirl to show off some comedic chops she’s never had occasion to display before now. Playing the blonde bombshell with well-earned self-awareness, she’s in on the joke and unafraid to look ridiculous (or sound ridiculous while attempting to scat) in the process. Paul Walter Hauser steps in for George Kennedy as Drebin’s partner (both men playing the sons of the earlier characters), while O.J. Simpson’s contribution to the series gets a brief, regretful nod. Neeson has never been above poking fun at his own stern, vengeful screen presence and real-world image, most notably in an episode of Donald Glover’s Atlanta and various cameos. Here he gets a chance to do it for a full movie, and a little goes a long way. Unlike Nielsen, who played serious parts in mostly B-movies before Airplane! launched his comedic career, Neeson is a major star with maybe too much Taken-style baggage to fully succeed here. He does give his all, however, and it’s not clear who else could have done a better job. (wide release)

Also this week

Ebony & Ivory: In 1982, musical legends Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder collaborated on the hit single “Ebony and Ivory,” which used a piano keyboard as a metaphor for racial harmony and drew fervent jeers from the commentariat for its facile vapidity. Director Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler) hated the song so much that he made an entire film depicting a farcical version of its creation, one that transcends the bounds of propriety to deliver a jaw-droppingly irreverent take. As in our reality, Stevie (Gil Gex) visits Paul (Sky Elobar) at Paul’s remote “Scottish cottage,” a phrase that is repeated with greater and greater brio over the course of the film. Unlike in our reality (probably), the two indulge in vegetarian snacks, smoke copious amounts of what Paul calls “doobie woobie,” and prance about for long stretches in the altogether, aided by hilarious prosthetic penises. They never really get down to songwriting, and the whole enterprise is held together by the two actors’ willingness to start over the top and go from there. It’s a surreal enough two-hander that one doesn’t feel like either McCartney or Wonder are being specifically targeted. Hosking’s goal, it seems, is to puncture the self-importance of the song while indulging in repetitive, often puerile antics that are probably best enjoyed after a meal of veggie nuggets and a bit of the old doobie-woobie. Hilarious stuff. (NOTE: Opens Friday August 8, Hollywood Theatre)

Francis Ford Coppola: The Tomorrow Theater has scored a real coup, as legendary filmmaker Coppola pays a visit as an adjunct to his current national tour of personal appearances in support of his most recent effort, Megalopolis. Over the weekend, the Tomorrow will screen The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s most iconic triumphs. Then, on Sunday August 3rd, following Megalopolis, Coppola’s hubristic, unique, bonkers vision of the city of tomorrow, the man himself will participate in what’s being called an “interactive audience discussion entitled ‘How to Change Our Future.’” This rare and expensive opportunity to share oxygen with one of cinema’s true titans is already sold out, but Oregon ArtsWatch will provide coverage next week. (8/1-8/3, Tomorrow Theater)

Queer Screams Film Festival: This annual event dedicated to LGBTQ+ genre fare kicks off Friday, August 1, with a double feature starring everyone’s favorite murderous doll, Chucky. The little rascal’s creator, Don Mancini, will be on hand for a Q&A between the films, which will themselves be preceded by a burlesque show. The rest of the weekend features batches of short films and three independent features before wrapping up Sunday with the movie that introduced Chucky, 1988’s Child’s Play, again with Mancini in attendance. (8/1-8/3, Clinton St. Theater)

Gut Instinct: “Former Portlander and New Zealand filmmaker Doug Dillaman brings his ‘postapocalyptic found footage instructional film on acid’ to The Clinton Street Theater as part of a global tour! Independently crafted over seven years, Gut Instinct blends science fiction, science fact, black comedy and intense visual freakouts together into a cinematic trip. Doug Dillaman in attendance for introduction and post-screening Q&A.” (8/4, Clinton St. Theater)

16mm Nyback Showdown: The latest installment of this battle royale between dueling teams of 16mm projectionists offers yet another riveting, unique hodgepodge of material from the archive of the late Dennis Nyback. (8/5, Clinton St. Theater)

Between the Mountain and the Sky: “After being named a CNN Hero, Maggie Doyne, guardian to over fifty Nepalese children, faces an unimaginable loss. Amid her grief, a chance encounter leads her to welcome a filmmaker into her life, capturing her journey, her family’s resilience, and—unexpectedly—their falling in love.” Director Jeremy Power Regimbal, Maggie Doyne, and author Cheryl Strayed will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A. (8/6, Cinema 21)

Also opening

The Bad Guys 2: “The Bad Guys are struggling to find trust and acceptance in their newly minted lives as Good Guys, when they are pulled out of retirement and forced to do “one last job” by an all-female squad of criminals.” (wide release)

Repertory

Friday 8/1

• Barbarian [2022] (Cinemagic, also 8/6 & 8/7)
• Go [1999] (5th Avenue Cinema, through 8/3)
• Strangers with Candy [2005] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Taxi Driver [1976] (Cinemagic, on 35mm, through 8/4)
• The Thin Red Line [1999] (Cinemagic, on 35mm, through 8/4)
• Traxx [1988] (Cinemagic, on VHS)

Saturday 8/2

• The American Astronaut [2001] (Cinema 21, on 35mm)
• Cabaret [1972] (Cinema 21)
• Stop Making Sense [1984] (Cinema 21)

Sunday 8/3

• Strangers on a Train [1951] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm)
• Sunset Boulevard [1950] (Salem Cinema, also 8/4)

Tuesday 8/5

• Princess Madam [1989] (Hollywood Theatre)

Wednesday 8/6

• Hawk Jones [1986] (Hollywood Theatre)
• This Is Spinal Tap [1984] (Living Room Theaters)