Sony Pictures Classics’ comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass opens wide along with IFC erotic thriller Night Nurse. Buzzy Barrio Triste by longtime Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz and documentaries including Ross McElwee’s Venice award-winning Remake and Jessica Earnshaw’s Baby Doe are other indie debuts this weekend.
SPC’s Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass by David Wain launches on 1,200 screens. Zoey Deutch stars as a small-town hairdresser engaged to her devoted high school sweetheart Tom. But her life takes a turn when a trip to a book signing leads to Tom meeting, and sleeping with, his “celebrity pass.” Reeling from the betrayal, Gail impulsively joins her friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) on a trip to L.A., where a psychic convinces her that she must even the scales with her own celebrity pass: Jon Hamm. They join forces with a talent agency assistant (Ben Wang), a paparazzo (Ken Marino) and actor John Slattery in the search for Hamm, colliding with celebrities and hunted by a group of Italian assassins. Cameos abound — from Jennifer Aniston to Hamm, Slattery and more in the Hollywood sex romp parody with Wizard Of Oz undertones that premiered at Sundance, see Deadline review.
Erotic thriller Night Nurse from Independent Film Company, written and directed by Georgia Bernstein in her feature debut, opens at 330 theaters. Mimi Rogers (Bosch: Legacy) and Cemre Paksoy (As the Crow Flies) star. When a series of perverse scam calls unsettles an idyllic retirement community, a nurse (Paksoy) becomes entangled with her mysterious patient (Bruce McKenzie). Premiered at the Sundance festival’s Next section.
RELATED: First-Time Feature Filmmaker Georgia Bernstein Examines “Dark Side Of Caregiving” With Erotic Thriller ‘Night Nurse’ – Sundance Studio
Remake from Music Box Films, a highly personal documentary by Ross McElwee and winner of the Golden Globes Impact Prize for documentary at the Venice Film Festival, opens at Film Forum in New York, expanding to Chicago, L.A., Toronto and other markets next week. The story of McElwee and his late son Adrian, who died in 2016 of an accidental drug overdose.
It opens one week after the successful re-release of Sherman’s March, McElwee’s 1986 breakthrough doc, which grossed $23k at the Film Forum and will be held over.
Official synopsis: McElwee has spent 40 years recording himself and his family, creating documentaries that chronicle the shifting contours of American society through the lens of personal history. His son Adrian grew up inside those films and eventually began experimenting with the camera himself. When a Hollywood producer acquires the rights to adapt Sherman’s March into a work of fiction, 20-year-old Adrian sees a chance for his father to finally reach a wider audience. As the adaptation stalls, Adrian gets swept into a deepening drug addiction and passes away from a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of personal video footage. Retracing Adrian’s final years, McElwee reckons with what his camera captured and what remained hauntingly out of frame. As he reflects on a lifetime behind the camera, Ross’ own effort to remix and remake the movie that Adrian never got to finish takes on new significance. Built from decades of home movies, Remake is McElwee’s attempt to hold on to his son, and to let him go.
Jessica Earnshaw’s documentary Baby Doe arrives at DCTV in New York for a weeklong run followed by screenings in L.A. on July 14 and 15, then San Francisco, Houston, Seattle and other cities. The SXSW-premiering true-crime story executive-produced by Sarah Paulson follows Gail Ritchey, a woman from a conservative Christian community rural Ohio, who was arrested for murder 30 years after leaving a newborn she believed to be stillborn in the woods. The mother of three sees her quiet suburban life shattered when DNA evidence links her to the infamous cold case of “Geauga’s Child” years later. Arrested for murder and vilified in the media, authorities dismiss her claim that the baby was stillborn. Facing a possible life sentence, Gail and her family must confront religious stigma, community judgment and long-buried shame in the fight for her freedom.
Film Movement opens Barrio Triste by photographer, video producer and longtime Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz. Produced by Harmony Korine, it premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice, going on the screen at TIFF and NYFF. Set in the Colombian city of Medellín in the early 1990s, Barrio Triste follows four teenage boys who steal a television news camera and begin filming their reckless, often violent exploits across the city’s streets, hills and raw brick neighborhoods. As Deadline reported, Barrio Triste is the first feature film to come down the pipeline from Korine’s multidisciplinary company EDGLRD since its creation in 2023, not directed by its founder. Stars Juan Pablo Baena, Samuel Velazquez, Tomas Tinoco Higuita and Bryan Erlin Garcia among others.
Icarus Films’ French documentary Do You Love Me by Lana Daher debuts at the Metrograph in NYC with screenings through August in a handful of markets including D.C., Atlanta, Cleveland and Boston. A personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory composed entirely of archival footage, it premiered at Venice as a love letter to Beirut through 70 years of film, TV, home videos and photography. The doc explores the Lebanese collective psyche, marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss, through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, reconstructing a fragmented history and celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory. It opens as the people of the country continue to endure bouts of on-and-off hostilities between Hezbollah militants and Israeli troops.