CineWomen: Nisha Ganatra refreshes ‘Freaky Friday’
Plus Kate Beecroft’s ‘East of Wall,’ Amy Berg’s ‘It’s Never Over Jeff Buckley, and Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s ‘Folktales’ and ‘The Boys of Baraka’
Among my first, favorite jobs was working at movie theaters. The gig started in high school in a resurrected small-town cinema that expanded next door into a very interesting space — I’ll save that tale for another day.
In college, I worked at St. Anthony Main, a stretch of buildings on the Mississippi River across from downtown Minneapolis. At the time the movie house there was a United Artists Theatre and then a Reading Cinema. It was a small, five-screener operated mostly by college kids run amok.
This is where I met Jeff, thirty years ago. He was the projectionist; I was the concession manager. It was very cute.
We slung popcorn and tore movie tickets and threaded film projectors. I can still smell the distinct rot of movie theater trash bins — greasy popcorn and sour soda.
We also doubled the seasoning on the popcorn and cranked the Spice Girls in the lobby and made screwdrivers with the Minute Maid juice machine.
Unrelatedly (I swear), I once scratched an entire print of Multiplicity by misthreading one of the rollers. Jeff got called in late one night to reconstruct Wild Bill, opening the projection booth door to find a pile of celluloid on the floor.
We taped up our ticket seller — including his mouth — during business hours. Ask me offline about the popcorn fish. Moviegoers went along with it.
There’s a rumor the place is haunted — specifically auditorium #3. Once Jeff opened the theater to find all the wall panels removed in there and leaned neatly against the wall. And he swears he opened the doors one night and heard a whisper: “Get out!” He did.
I bring this all up because I swung by St. Anthony Main this summer between popping into the Mill City Museum and a WNBA Lynx game.
The theater is still open — it’s called The Main Cinema now and run by the MSP Film Society. The tacky carpet is gone, replaced by exposed concrete, and there are LED screens above the auditorium doors and a chandelier hovering over the stairs. I echo the joke on the marquee: “Sorry baby to anybody not seeing Sorry Baby.”
I hope the crew behind the concession stand is having as much fun as we did.
‘Freakier Friday’
It’s pretty remarkable that it took twenty-two years to make a sequel to Freaky Friday, a movie so beloved even by the people who made it that all the major players and several of the minor ones returned for a second go-round more than two decades later.
But then, as repeatable as the premise is, once a mother and daughter have swapped bodies — and gone through the hijinks to fulfill a magic fortune cookie’s promise that “selfless love will change you back” — they’d be hard put to duplicate the experience, at least in a way that’s fresh.
Working from a script by Jordan Weiss, director Nisha Ganatra (of The High Note and Late Night as well as a bunch of television) has found a way in that puts enough of a twist on the original plot to resurrect Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan’s chemistry and revisit the nostalgic setpieces that resonate with fans.
In Freakier Friday, it’s pop-star manager Anna (Lohan) who’s getting married to hunky British chef Eric (Manny Jacinto), much to the chagrin of their nemeses daughters — surfer Harper (Julia Butters) and fashionista Lily (Sophia Hammons). Meanwhile, now a successful therapist embarking on her first book tour, Tess (Curtis) is a dedicated grandmother/”coparent” with a tendency to overstep her bounds.
In one of many hilarious supporting roles, Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) — a low-rent psychic providing entertainment at Anna’s bachelorette party — curses the three generations of women to “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong.” (X Mayo as the girls’ principal and Santina Muha as an immigration officer are also scene stealers.)
The next morning, mother and daughter Anna and Harper have switched places, as have future stepgrandmother and -daughter Tess and Lily — trades that are hard to keep track of because the actresses don’t really take on their counterparts’ personalities beyond young versus old. Curtis, for example, doesn’t adopt Lily’s English accent.
Still, this setup provides a showcase for Curtis’ unique charm when she’s portraying a teenager trapped in the body of an older woman. The iconic actress gives voice to the horrors of aging — faces that wrinkle, knees that give out, bladders that lose control — and she’s having the time of her life doing it.
Twenty years in the making, this sequel isn’t perfect — four swapped souls are a lot to wrangle, and the script doesn’t really know what to do with the younger actresses while Curtis and Lohan romp around Los Angeles (playing fast and loose with geography).
Among their escapades is reuniting with Jake (Chad Michael Murray), Anna’s love interest from the first film, whose age-inappropriate infatuation with Tess is suggested as the reason for their breakup. Also returning for the sequel are everyone from Mark Harmon as Tess’ husband and Ryan Malgarini as Anna’s brother, to Lucille Soong and Rosalind Chao, the Chinese restaurateurs with the fateful fortune cookies, to Anna’s high school bandmates.
Like Freaky Friday before it, Freakier Friday ends up onstage at a rock concert where Anna is supposed to perform, but of course the person in her body (in this case, Harper) doesn’t have a clue how to play, necessitating some creative air guitar and a teary moment when mother and daughter and grandmother and stepgranddaughter really see each other.
This is what makes the Freaky franchise(?) so enchanting, and director Ganatra did well not to lose sight of that.
Freakier Friday (2025), directed by Nisha Ganatra (theaters)
‘East of Wall’
Kate Beecroft takes a page from Chloe Zhao’s oeuvre for her feature debut, a modern Western set on the edge of South Dakota’s Badlands that fictionalizes the real-life story of a horse whisperer with a tragic past. Sound familiar? East of Wall has more than a little in common with The Rider, Zhao’s project set on the Pine Ridge Reservation that pulls aspects from the life of its lead actor, a bronc buster barred by injury from riding anymore.
Like Zhao, writer-director Beecroft, too, embedded with the stars of her film, in this case Tabatha Zimiga, a widowed rancher who rescues and trains horses and then sells them on TikTok — yes, TikTok. The star of many of her breathtaking videos — flying free on horseback, Tabatha hanging her phone out of a pickup truck window to capture her thundering across the plain — is her daughter Porshia, a warrior in her own right.
There’s no question Tabatha is a compelling protagonist, with a shock of half-shaved blonde hair, tats, and piercings, managing a swath of land that’s at once wildly beautiful and dotted with detritus, as well as a herd of teenagers with nowhere else to go.
But like the woman herself, the performance and the story built around it — Scoot McNairy plays a Texas investor who wants to buy her business — are a bit rough around the edges, and the film’s asides in the crumbling Badlands are never really integrated into the narrative.
Still, as a onetime South Dakota cowgirl myself, I can’t help but be enchanted by how East of Wall juxtaposes the romanticism of horsewomanship against an otherworldly backdrop with the hardship, poverty, and resilience of West River womanhood.
East of Wall (2025), directed by Kate Beecroft (theaters)
‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’
Jeff Buckley may have outlived the 27 Club by three years, but the ’90s alt-rock singer-songwriter is yet another musician who passed too soon, after releasing one revered album, Grace, and just before recording his second, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk.
Documentarian Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil, Janis: Little Girl Blue) revisits Buckley’s tragic genius through his music; a rich archive of family photos and video; and interviews with the people who loved him, including his mother Mary Guibert, romantic partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, and bandmates including Michael Tighe and Parker Kindred.
What emerges is a portrait of a celestial body who pulled people into his orbit with playful wit and emotional vulnerability but could also be fickle in a way that seemed inconsiderate and cruel — perhaps due to “dipping and dabbling” in drugs, perhaps due to undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
What’s undeniable is that he was an enormous talent, with a powerful voice; an obsession with musical influences from Led Zeppelin to Nina Simone to Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; and a perfectionist streak that turned doing what he loved most in the world torturous.
Berg conveys both the dazzling light and murky shadows of Buckley’s personality by coaxing intimate memories and archival materials from those close to him, including his stunning last voicemail to his mother, as well as some creative neon line animation and gorgeous contemplative footage — shimmering teal water, warm orange sky — from where he spent his last moments.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a profound elegy of profound loss.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (2025), directed by Amy Berg (theaters)
‘Folktales’ and ‘Boys of Baraka’
Two decades after their first collaboration as directors, documentarians Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady return to a topic that’s familiar with their latest project, if everything else couldn’t be more different.
Their latest film, Folktales, follows young, mostly European men and women taking a gap year two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Their first film, The Boys of Baraka, goes with Baltimore middle schoolers — specifically Black boys — to rural Kenya. Both portray youth adrift in their modern environs, looking for an opportunity to change the course of their lives, and the remote programs designed to help them.
In Folktales, we meet Hege, a party girl nudged north by the memory of her dead dad; Bjørn, a loner who even describes himself as annoying; and Romain, who also struggles with social anxiety. At a traditional folk high school in Norway, they spend a year after graduation learning survival skills.
The educators’ goal is to “wake up your Stone Age brain” with solo winter camping trips, the seasonal ritual of welcoming back the sun after two months of darkness, and especially the responsibility of caring for (and bonding with) sled dogs. (The gnarlier bits, like hunting, take place offscreen.)
All of this takes place against the otherworldly backdrop of the Arctic north — think verdant valleys and winter wonderlands and the Northern lights. Plus Ewing and Grady braid in the Norse mythology of three Norns — powerful deities who shape humans’ futures by weaving threads of fate. It’s a rich metaphor, returned to again and again — to the point it risks losing its luster — from the ropes by which the dogs pull their human companions’ sleds to a majestic tree wrapped in red yarn expressly for the film’s final image.
In The Boys of Baraka, we meet 13-year-old Richard, a smart and “strong man” who compares himself to Frederick Douglas, and his little brother Romesh; 12-year-old preacher-in-the-making Devon; and 12-year-old trouble-maker Montrey. At the Baraka School in East Africa, they spend two years preparing for high school.
Away from drug-riddled streets, dysfunctional families, television and fast food, the boys focus on their studies, healthy habits, and conflict resolution — culminating the school year by summiting Mount Kenya. (That nearly all of the authority figures in their new environment are white isn’t addressed, let alone interrogated.) The experience isn’t without obstacles: Some boys get homesick, others still get into fights, and, just as they’re about to return from summer break, they get news that the Barack School has shut down due to world events.
Their story, too, takes place amid stunning scenery, with Ewing and Grady’s shimmering images punctuated with shots of elephants, zebras, and giraffes, though the film’s more cramped aspect ratio and lower image quality (at least in the current version available) makes its viewing experience less expansive.
Results of both the Scandinavian folk high school and the Baraka school vary — with some participants thriving after the experience and others struggling — but Ewing and Grady’s special talent is gaining the trust of their protagonists and sharing such intimate moments with us that we care.
Folktales (2025), directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (theaters)
The Boys of Baraka (2005), directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Vimeo)
