Today's trailer happy hour tries to figure out who killed Biggie, with a little help from Johnny Depp
Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, folks; this is where the trailers lives. Today we’ve got jungle kids, true crime docs, awkward cowboy romance, and Johnny Depp: Rap Detective, so let’s dive right in.
First up: Brad Furman’s City Of Lies, which pairs up intrepid reporter Forest Whitaker with doughy ex-cop Depp in an attempt to solve the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.. Will they get to the bottom of this decades-old alleged conspiracy? Maybe. Will they spend a lot of time intensely whispering about how this “could set the city on fire”? Almost certainly. City Of Lies makes its way to theaters on September 7.
Next up: Mowgli, the new Rudyard Kipling adaptation from motion capture superstar-turned-director Andy Serkis. Starring Rohan Chand as the plucky man-cub, and Christian Bale as his protector, Bagheera, the film—in theaters October 19—looks to be a much darker spin on The Jungle Book than Jon Favreau’s Disney adaptation from 2016.
Still not as dark…as murder, though. Which is to say, we’ve also got a trailer for Netflix’s latest true-crime documentary, The Staircase, an American relaunch of director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s long-running set of docu-series about the legal woes of novelist and accused murderer Michael Peterson. Peterson’s wife, Kathleen, died in 2001; de Lestrade has been documenting his trials, retrials, and more ever since, periodically checking in on him and the case against him. Netflix helped popularize the true-crime genre via Making A Murderer, so it’s presumably hoping for similar returns when The Staircase debuts on June 8.
Next up, we’ve got a trailer for Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska’s Damsel, which seems to sit somewhere in between “light-hearted Western comedy” and “gaslighting horror story” as the promo progresses. Directed by the Zellner brothers, the film sees Pattinson’s dandy doggedly pursue his “former love,” Penelope, but it’s not entirely clear how cute it’s supposed to be, no matter how many miniature horses he keeps in tow. (Our own A.A. Dowd gave it a B- when he saw it at Sundance this year, for what it’s worth.)
Finally, we’ve got the latest mesmerizingly unsettling entry from Drive and The Neon Demon’s Nicolas Winding Refn. After watching the trailer, we can’t rightly tell you what Refn’s new Amazon show, Too Old To Die Young, is about; all we can say is that Miles Teller is in there somewhere, and that it unnerved the hell out of us to watch. (Who knew a simple bolo tie could look so unsettling?) The series debuts on Amazon some time next year.