Godzilla's Birthday Return and the Woman Behind Goodnight Moon

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Coming up on Spotlight: Godzilla comes home for his birthday, Carrie Coon follows Lily James into a commune, and a new film goes looking for the woman behind Goodnight Moon.

Today is Godzilla Day in Japan, the anniversary of the original film's release in November nineteen fifty-four, and Toho is celebrating the obvious way. Godzilla Minus Zero opens in Japanese theaters today, and in North America on Friday through GKIDS.

Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One won the visual effects Oscar with a monster movie about guilt, grief and rebuilding after the war. The sequel picks up in nineteen forty-nine, two years on. Koichi and Noriko have settled into an ordinary family life with little Akiko, and then a new threat arrives. Yamazaki again wrote, directed and handled the effects, and it is the first Japanese production certified as Filmed for IMAX.

David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter calls it "a radioactive blast," and credits Yamazaki for trusting audiences to spend time with these people between the wreckage. One sweet detail from the Tokyo press tour: Sae Nagatani, who played Akiko as a toddler and mostly cried or said single words, now has full dialogue. Her co-stars wondered whether she could manage it. She arrived with every line memorized.

The Liberation has its first trailer, and it looks like a heavy one. In Guy Nattiv’s film, Carrie Coon plays Rita, a nineteen-eighties New Jersey housewife and Holocaust survivor who falls under the spell of a spiritual leader played by Lily James and leaves her family for an all-women commune. Her daughters, Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young, come to bring her home and get drawn in themselves.

The story comes from Nattiv's own family. He told Deadline that as a boy he was taken to seminars with his grandmother, and only later understood it was a cult she had left his grandfather to join. Years afterward he went back with a camera and came away with empathy: the group, he says, tried to free her from her trauma. That promises something far more complicated than rescuing Mom from the bad people. Bleecker Street opens it in New York and Los Angeles this Friday, and wider January eighth.

Jimmy Stewart's daughter Kelly assumed a movie about her father would be boring. No scandals, no drinking. Then she heard the pitch for Jimmy, about the part of his life he was proudest of and never discussed with his kids: the war, when the Oscar-winning star of The Philadelphia Story flew twenty combat missions over Europe leading B-24 crews.

Riverdale's KJ Apa plays Stewart. Pete Hammond at Deadline says Apa gets the famous voice and manner without sliding into impersonation, and that the film is strongest on the war and what it left behind, as a shaken Stewart lets Frank Capra talk him into It's a Wonderful Life. A man doubting his own worth, playing George Bailey. Watch for Karolyn Grimes, the original Zuzu, in a cameo. Fathom opens it in theaters Friday.

Margaret Wise Brown wrote more than a hundred children's books, and her own life was a lot less tucked in than Goodnight Moon. Rebecca Miller's Moonsong: A Life in Seven Verses stars Elle Fanning as Brown in nineteen-thirties New York, inventing a new, sensory way of writing for children while carrying on intense affairs with the poet Michael Strange, played by Julianne Moore, and the socialite Bill Gaston, played by Josh Hartnett.

Deadline reports Emma Thompson and Sally Hawkins have now joined too. Miller calls Brown "at once innocent and feral," not how most of us picture the author of The Runaway Bunny. The most intriguing name is behind the camera: Neal Scanlan, the Oscar-winning creature effects and puppetry specialist from the Star Wars sequels. Make of that what you will, bunny fans. Filming starts in May.

Yaeji's new single is called "ddr," as in Dance Dance Revolution, the arcade game where you stomp on arrows in time to the music. Stereogum's Tom Breihan hears a funky, skittering club track, with drums borrowed from Chicago footwork under her deadpan vocal. The video follows a stylish stranger off the subway and into an underground Dance Dance Revolution party.

Yaeji asks, in her note on the song, what the world we want would look like if this one is suffocating us. Her answer involves a lot of dancing together. "This one is for you," she writes. "It's also for me." New Yorkers can test the theory Friday night at Paragon in Brooklyn, where the release party comes with DJs and the actual game.

And anime is getting a big awards night of its own. The Association of Japanese Animations announced Monday that the new Nippon Anime Awards will hold their first ceremony in Tokyo on November twenty-first, twenty twenty-seven, honoring the shows and the people who make them, with an eye on fans overseas.

The reveal closed the Tokyo Anime Next festival, where the Tokyo Philharmonic played music from Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan. Singer Sally Amaki, who grew up in Los Angeles, told the crowd her way into anime music was the opening theme from Gurren Lagann. She sang it at her voice acting audition. It worked.

That's Spotlight. Godzilla on Friday, Jimmy Stewart on Friday, a dance party on Friday. Plan accordingly, and have a good morning.