2018 Nominee Watch – June 29th

This weekend, we have an original sports comedy and an action thriller sequel coming to theaters. Look for Sicario: Day of the Soldado and Uncle Drew at a theater near you.

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Sicario: Day of the Soldado
If you're looking for lots of action, shooting, and explosions this weekend, Sicario: Day of the Soldado is the place to look. With both Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin returning from the original 2015 film, this promises to be more of the same.

The film centers around del Toro's Alejandro Gillick and Brolin's Matt Graver running an operation to start a war between rival drug cartels in Mexico by kidnapping the daughter of one of the drug lords. As you might expect in a film like this, things go South quickly and plans have to change. Gillick turns rogue in order to protect the daughter, only to become the target of a new hunt.

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I just saw the original Sicario for the first time recently and can understand why it received nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing. The musical score, which was also nominated, did less for me than some, but I can still understand the nomination.

While this film returns the main cast and production team, there is a new director, cinematographer, and composer at the helm, leading me to think there will be less buzz around potential nominations.

Additionally, the first film was not initially a wide release. It began at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 and also showed at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The wide release did not come until October of 2015, when it already had some buzz from the festival circuit. Because this sequel is going straight to a wide release based on the success of the first film, I feel there is less likelihood of nominations coming from the Academy. If anything, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing nominations are the closest thing to a sure bet in an action film like this.

Uncle Drew
I've been seeing previews for this film on television for a few months and wondered when it was finally coming to theaters, and the wait is over. It releases nationwide on June 29th.

This looks like a fun take on the "underdog" sports story, flipped on its head with current and former NBA stars playing aging street basketball stars as they take on some young(er) upstarts. The cast includes current Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving alongside former NBA stars Shaquille O'Neal, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller, and Nate Robinson, with assistance from WNBA star, and 4-time Olympian, Lisa Leslie.

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I feel like I know how this film is going to go. From the previews, it looks like it follows films like Dodgeball, Mighty Ducks, or A League of Their Own, albeit with a slightly different cast of characters. It's hard to create a new spin on the underdog sports story these days. There have been many films that have done this genre well, and many more that have done it very poorly.

The cast aside, I feel like this is one of those films with most of the funny bits in the trailers and we're not going to get much new from the film itself.

Suffice to say, none of the true ballers are going to win any awards from the Academy. ESPYs maybe, but not Oscars. This will be a fun summer flick, but likely won't have much in the way of long term legs, especially with blockbusters like Ant-Man and the Wasp, Hotel Transylvania 3, and Mission Impossible - Fallout releasing next month.

Limited Releases

• Black Water – Aging action stars Jean-Claude van Damme (Kickboxer) and Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV) fight to escape imprisonment aboard a submarine.
• The Cakemaker – A young man journeys to Israel to meet the wife of his dead lover and ends up working in her bakery.
• Custody – French drama about a family fighting for custody of their young boy following a divorce.
• Dark River – A woman returns to claim farmland left by her deceased father only to confront more of her past than she planned.
• Escape Plan 2: Hades – Sylvester Stallone (The Expendables) and Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) break an operative out of an elaborate prison..
• The Game Changers – Director James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) delivers a documentary about elite athletes from runners and football players to bodybuilders and weightlifters as they explore the benefits of vegan diets.
• Hover – A near future science fiction thriller where drones work the farmland, but have a threatening secret.
• Ideal Home – Paul Rudd (Ant-Man, Anchorman) and Steve Coogan (Night at the Museum) play a gay couple who's lives turn chaotic when a young boy said to be a grandson shows up unexpectedly.
• Leave No Trace – A father and daughter living together in the wilderness are forced to join society.

• Love All You Have Left – Family mystery with a girl named Anne Frank, claiming a famed diary as her own.
• Love, Cecil – Documentary about famed costume and fashion designer (My Fair Lady, Gigi).
• Sanju – Indian biopic about the actor Sanjay Dutt and the various ups and downs of his life.
• This is Congo – Documentary about the long running conflict that have plagued The Democratic Republic of the Congo. 
• Three Identical Strangers – Documentary about triplets separated at birth who find each other in adulthood only to find out there is a deeper secret behind their separation.
• Woman Walks Ahead – Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Martian) plays Catherine Weldon who ventures west to paint Sitting Bull, only to be accused of coercion by Colonel Silas Groves, played by Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).