![\""Ice](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/asset_b2aa59c2-6e95-4deb-9f13-f876df086b3b.png\"\/)
“Ice Cream Man”The Horror Section<\/p>\nCookie Queens ***1\/2
Director Alysa Nahmias\u2019 formula here is like 85% adorableness and 15% other stuff, but oh man does she nail the adorableness. Her subject is the $800 million annual business that is the selling of Girl Scout cookies, focusing on four girls from around the country trying to hit their goals during the several-weeks-long annual selling window. Much of the focus is on 12-year-old Olive, a cookie-shilling wunderkind whose skills at upselling seem to dazzle all her customers into additional purchases, and there are layers to her character in her growing consciousness about being an exploited worker as well as the perils of pinning her entire identity on being an ace salesperson. And Nahmias definitely doesn\u2019t shy away from the pressures on parents\u2014who need to pre-purchase their kids\u2019 inventory\u2014trying to be supportive through rainy or otherwise unsuccessful sales days. But it\u2019s really clear that the filmmaker had great instincts for picking her subjects for their potential appeal to audiences, including Nikki, whose ambitions are tied entirely to emulating her older sisters, and 5-year-old Ara, a first-timer whose innocence has her interpreting one woman\u2019s \u201cmaybe later\u201d response to a sales pitch as an assurance that she\u2019ll be coming back soon. There are even some really inspired bits of visual filmmaking, like watching Ara struggle with pulling her wagon of cookies across the sand on a San Diego beach. The result is a documentary as sweet and easy to enjoy as a box of Thin Mints. Available Aug. 7 in theaters. (G)<\/p>\n
“Ice Cream Man”The Horror Section<\/p>\n
Ice Cream Man ***
In the age of \u201celevated horror,\u201d we need a term for the stuff that\u2019s just gleefully gross\u2014maybe \u201cbasement horror?\u201d\u2014like the latest high-concept mayhem from co-writer\/director Eli Roth. In the picturesque town of Bayleen Bay, the arrival of summer is accompanied by the arrival of a mysterious ice cream man (Ari Millen), whose frozen treats turn any child who eats them into a homicidal monster, leaving lactose-intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) among the few kids unaffected. What follows combines a bit of Weapons, a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and\u2014in one particularly amusing set piece\u2014a bit of The Birds for something that gets nearly all of its juice out of graphic depictions of children committing creative murder with whatever object is at hand, including the ice cream man\u2019s preferred weapon of a combo ice cream scoop\/bone saw. And it\u2019s kind of outrageously fun in its over-the-top-ness, most notably in an extended playground sequence that finds the possessed youngsters turning a head into a tetherball, jumping rope with an intestine, etc. Eventually there\u2019s a long expository scene that explains the origin of our monster, and it\u2019s kinda forced in its attempt at a lesson about scapegoating, even if the instructions for ending the threat get hilariously complicated. Think of it as a kind of spiritual successor to morality-play creep-outs like Tales from the Crypt\u2014just don\u2019t call it \u201celevated.\u201d Available Aug. 7 in theaters. (NR)<\/p>\n
![\""Wild](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/asset_d0b6355b-00e5-41fa-83c4-c601176b33b9.png\"\/)
“Wild Inside”David Lei<\/p>\n
Wild Inside ***
Documentarian Penny Lane has often explored quirkier subjects like Satanists and \u201cSea Monkeys,\u201d so she might not intuitively seem like the ideal fit for telling the story of Flaco, the 13-year-old Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from New York\u2019s Central Park Zoo in early 2023 and immediately captured the imagination of the city\u2019s residents. Yet she shows a wonderfully deft touch as she follows the Flaco saga, told through characters like animal researchers, bird rescue workers and the birding-enthusiast photographers who become a kind of Flaco-razzi following the bird\u2019s every move. What emerges is a fascinating study of the way animals can become a kind of screen onto which humans project their own feelings, whether that involves the question of whether Flaco was better off in captivity than he was in the wild, or even feeling sympathy for the non-native-species\u2019 futile mating behavior because \u201cdating is hard in New York for everyone.\u201d Along the way, Lane is wise enough to take time simply to observe Flaco and other creatures in Central Park, allowing them to be the star in a way that understands how encounters with wild nature can be spiritual moments for people. Inevitably some of the anecdotes from people about their experiences with Flaco become repetitive, but even then, it\u2019s a way to show that the story of Flaco is really the story of what we decide to make of his life. Available Aug. 7 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cookie Queens ***1\/2Director Alysa Nahmias\u2019 formula here is like 85% adorableness and 15% other stuff, but oh man…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[14114,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-314447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-film-reviews","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}