Monday new releases: 11 August 2025

Freakier Friday, Weapons, The Friend and Rivera Revenge are in cinemas and The Pickup is streaming on Prime Video.

While there are plenty of aspects of Freakier Friday — sequel to the 2003 smash hit which was itself a remake of a 1976 hit that propelled Jodie Foster to stardom — that seem to have been grown in a Disney Channel laboratory, it justifies its own existence well enough.

Mother and daughter from the earlier film, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, are now grandmother and daughter, joined by granddaughter (Julia Butters as Harper) and soon-to-be step-sister (Sophia Hammons as Lily) with all four characters experiencing the magic body swap that teaches them lessons about empathy and belonging.

Lily is a snobby English-Philipino new arrival at Harper’s Los Angeles high school. When their social friction turns into something requiring a parent-teacher conference, Harper’s single-mom Anna (Lohan) meets Lily’s widowed dad Eric (Manny Jacinto) and romance blooms — to the horror of the two teens.

Eric wants he and Lily to join Anna’s extended LA family — including Curtis as Tess, the psychologist grandmother, and easygoing granddad Ryan (Mark Harmon) but Lily wants to live in London where she can flit to Paris Fashion Week and become a famous designer. When a multi-hyphenate fortune teller (Vanessa Bayer) conjures up a spell that bodyswaps the teens for the grown-ups, Lily and Harper realise they can use this situation to their mutual advantage — break up the relationship between their parents and go back to how things were.

This sets the scene for the usual hijinks that allow all the performers to set aside their dignity and have fun at each other’s — and each other’s generation’s — expense. It’s not particular subtle but actors love doing this stuff and it shows on the screen. And there are cross-generational shortcut references — podcasting, pickleball — to ensure that everyone feels seen.

By the end, lessons have been learned and selfish attitudes have been corrected. There are a few emotional moments there and what it delivers, it actually earns.

Freakier Friday is written, directed and edited by women — women of colour, too — and I found myself wondering why there’s been no equivalent story told for men and boys. I’m no gender expert but it seems to me as if men don’t go through the same distinct chapters of life that women do — 36-year-old men aren’t dramatically distinct enough from 16-year-old boys, at least not enough to make it either horrible or funny. Whereas, women from different generations have had genuinely different life experiences — ageing is different for women.

Yesterday’s double-feature included a couple of “how did you get so old?” moments. Mark Harmon plays what I’m sure is meant to be an idealised husband and grandfather figure — keep quiet and stay out of the way — but he’s dressed in shirts and suits that are slightly too big for him, making him look strikingly elderly when you remember his dashing persona in Chicago Hope and NCIS.

And the presence of an unrecognisable Amy Madigan in Zach Creggar’s Weapons suggests to me that his film exists in an expanded Field of Dreams universe. The nature of the supernatural phenomenon switching from good-natured family healing to evil voodoo magic shouldn’t be at all surprising to anyone who has lived through the intervening decades.

Weapons is an entertaining concoction, although it seems to have been reverse-engineered to reach a particular wild conclusion – an amazing sequence, credit where it’s due – rather than deliver successfully on its early premise. In a small town that could have been called Normalville, an entire class of middle-schoolers goes missing (apart from one). They all got out of bed at 2.17 one morning and walked off into the night, never to be seen again.