New Releases for the Week of October 3, 2014

GONE GIRL

(20th Century Fox) Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Missi Pyle, Sela Ward, Boyd Holbrook. Directed by David Fincher

Nick and Amy have the perfect marriage. They love each other madly, support each other completely and are in the initial stages of building a long and fruitful life together. Or so it seems. On the evening of their fifth wedding anniversary Amy turns up missing. As the facade of the perfect marriage begins to crumble, the spotlight turns on Nick who it seems is far from the perfect husband. Did Nick murder his wife? Or is something far more different going on?

See the trailer, clips and a promo here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)

Genre: Thriller

Rating: R (for a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language)

Annabelle

(New Line) Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Tony Amendola. From last year’s hit The Conjuring comes this spin-off, set before the events of that film. Here we find out how the doll Annabelle became so deadly as a cult of vicious Satanists who attack a pregnant wife and her husband. Although they manage to survive the tack, the cultists do not but their blood and horrible memories are not all they leave behind; they had conjured up a demonic entity that has attached itself to the doll, a gift from the husband to his wife. That gift is going to be the kind that keeps on giving, you can be sure of that!

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)

Genre: Supernatural Horror

Rating: R (for intense sequences of disturbing violence and terror)

Bang Bang

(Fox Star) Katrina Kaif, Hrithik Roshan, Jimmy Shergill, Preity Uupala. A mousy bank employee falls into international intrigue when a mysterious stranger comes into his life, claiming to be a spy on a secret mission to save the world. Can she trust the word of this charming stranger? Is he what he says he is? Or is he delusional and leading her into the kind of trouble that she can’t dig her way out of? A remake of the recent Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)

Genre: Bollywood Action

Rating: NR

The Good Lie

(Warner Brothers) Reese Witherspoon, Corey Stoll, Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany. Sudanese refugees travel 1500 miles on foot to reach a refugee camp where they have a shot at getting the golden ticket to America where they can star their lives over in freedom. Four young brothers have been through incredible trauma making it to America but their sister is left behind for a later flight. However when 9-11 halts refugee activity, a social worker is moved to help these boys reunite their family even though the odds are stacked against them.

See the trailer and premiere footage here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: True Life Drama

Rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, some violence, brief strong language and drug use)

Govindudu Andarivadele

(Parameswara Arts) Ram Charan, Srikanth, Kajal Aggarwal, Kamalinee Mukherjee. A young agriculture student visits his grandfather’s house in an effort to reconcile the old man with his father. As he does so he discovers the story behind their estrangement and his grandfather learns why the student has come to mend fences at that specific time.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Bollywood Family

Rating: NR

Haider

(UTV) Shahid Kapoor, Tabu, Narendra Jha, Irrfan Khan. A modern version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in India, this is the third in a Shakespearean trilogy by director Vishal Bhardwaj.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Bollywood Drama

Rating: NR

Hector and the Search for Happiness

(Relativity) Simon Pegg, Christopher Plummer, Rosamund Pike, Stellan Skarsgard. A psychiatrist who has fallen into a rut, decides he is no longer qualified to advise his patients on how to have a better, more fulfilling life if he hasn’t lived one himself yet. He goes out therefore on an adventure throughout the world trying to find what happiness is.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Dramedy

Rating: R  (for language and some brief nudity)

Left Behind

(Stoney Lake) Nicolas Cage, Chad Michael Murray, Lea Thompson, Cassi Thomson. When the Rapture takes place and the righteous ascend to heaven, those that remain on Earth discover that there’s a reason why going to heaven was a much better idea.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)

Genre: Faith-Based Adventure

Rating: PG-13 (for some thematic elements, violence/peril and brief drug content)

The Liberator

(Cohen Media Group) Edgar Ramirez, Danny Huston, Maria Valverde, Gary Lewis. The story of Simon Bolivar, who led a revolt of the South American indigenous peoples against the colonial might of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. He was instrumental in freeing millions of people to self-govern and is regarded as one of the most beloved heroes in the region.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Biographical Drama

Rating: NR

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Life of Pi

Some days you feel like you can grab a tiger by the tail; other days not so much.

(2012) Drama (20th Century Fox) Suraj Sharma, Irffan Khan, Gerard Depardieu, Rafe Spall, Adil Hussein, Ayush Tandon, Gautam Belur, Tabu, Ayan Khan, Mohd Abbas Khaleeli, Vibish Shivakumar, James Saito, Jun Naito, Andrea Di Stefano, Elie Alouf, Shravanthi Sainath. Directed by Ang Lee

 

Things happen. Whether it is for a reason or if they just happen has been a question that we have been trying to figure out since we could put a coherent thought together. In many ways, this is what is driving our entire faith versus reason argument that we seem to be engaged in as a culture.

Piscine Molitor Patel (Sharma) was born in Pondicherry, India, where the French once held sway. He was named for a swimming pool in France where the waters were remarkably clear and his swim-crazy uncle (with a body that can only be described as cartoonish) was remarkably fond of. Unfortunately, his school mates pronounce his first name as something that young boys are prone to doing in swimming pools (think about it) and he decides to shorten it to “Pi” and paves the way for it by memorizing the numerals of Pi to many, many decimals in turn impressing both students and teachers in his school.

Nothing about Pi’s life is ordinary. His father (Hussein) owns a zoo although he really know nothing about animals. It is up to Pi’s mother (Tabu), his brother Ravi (Shivakumar) and himself to tend the animals. Even so, Pi finds time to fall in love with Anandi (Sainath), which looks like it could be going somewhere.

Unfortunately, fate has a curveball in store for Pi. The zoo is failing and his father has decided to move the whole family (including the animals) to Canada to start a new life. Pi is devastated. He has no desire to leave but this is not anything within his control. After a tearful goodbye to Anandi (which he doesn’t remember, only spending that last day with her) he and his family board a Japanese cargo ship bound for Canada.

Once again, fate steps in with another game-changer. In the middle of a terrible storm, the ship sinks and everyone aboard drowns. Everyone, that is, except for Pi, an orangutan, a zebra and a hyena. Oh, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker who find themselves marooned in a lifeboat. The law of the jungle prevails and the tiger kills and eats everything except for Pi who takes refuge on a makeshift raft made up of oars and life jackets. Richard Parker guards his territory well and as the boat and raft floats aimlessly in the Pacific, the odds that Pi and Parker will survive dwindle.

This is all told through a framing mechanism in which the adult Pi (Khan) relates the story to a writer (Spall) who was urged to hear the story from Pi’s uncle who remained in India. Pi is still affected by the emotions of his ordeal (breaking into tears at one point) but is remarkably sanguine about the whole ordeal which his uncle told the writer would make him believe in God. However, let’s just say that Pi may not be the most trustworthy narrator you can find.

This is as visually inventive and breathtaking a movie as you will see this year. Everything about it rings true but there is also a kind of fairy tale-like flavor to the story and even to the visuals, turning Pondicherry into an idyllic place, and a sea into a multiple personality disorder entity, alternately calm as glass with a cloud-streaked sky reflecting in it, to full of luminous green plankton and raging with storms. The water is a metaphor for life, changing when we least expect it and never into anything convenient.

The movie is based on a book that was widely considered unfilmable and it is to Lee’s credit that he found a way to make it work. However do keep in mind that the bulk of the action takes place on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with one human and one tiger. While it never gets boring, it can get slow.

Much about the film is fanciful and towards the end of the movie you are given a choice to make which essentially gives you the option of faith or reason. The movie heavily skews its own leanings towards one side and that might be offensive towards those who lean in the other direction. And while it is professed that Pi’s story will make you believe in God, quite frankly I don’t see it converting any atheists.

Still, it does lead you to ask some pretty deep questions as to the truth behind faith and reason. What is reality, after all, but our perception of it and what we perceive as fact and what we perceive as beyond our understanding can be tricky. The will to survive can’t be quantified or measured but it is undeniably there – yet a Bengal tiger that looks for all the world like a living, breathing animal can be completely computer generated. Is he any less real for that however? This is the kind of thing that used to give Aristotle headaches.

The good thing however is that you can give these thoughts whatever attention you believe they deserve or what you’re willing to give them. You can sit back and relax and take in the breathtaking images and let not a single stray thought invade your skull if so you choose. It’s all up to you. Now, there are those who won’t even consider seeing this without a single solitary star in the cast (Gerard Depardieu appears briefly as a ill-tempered ship’s cook but many Americans wouldn’t even consider the French Colossus in the same firmament of a Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt), although several of the actors including Irffan Khan and Tabu are big stars in India. Still, that hasn’t been enough to really propel the film into stratospheric box office numbers which does give rise to the theory that Americans really don’t like movies that make them think. Ah well. Perhaps Lee should have figured out how to put a car chase in this one, or had the tiger fight the shark with machine guns and rocket launchers. And you wonder why our test scores suck.

REASONS TO GO: Beautifully shot. Deeper and more thought-provoking than the average Hollywood film.

REASONS TO STAY: Loses momentum at times.

FAMILY VALUES:  Some of the emotions depicted here are pretty rough. There are also some action sequences that are pretty scary.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Although Khan doesn’t appear in any scenes with the tiger, this is the second movie in 2012 he has appeared in with a character named Richard Parker, the first being The Amazing Spider-Man.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/11/12: Rotten Tomatoes: 88% positive reviews. Metacritic: 78/100. The critics definitely love this one..

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Where the Wild Things Are

BENGAL TIGER LOVERS: Richard Parker, the tiger in the movie is mostly CGI – every scene in which he appears with Pi is CGI. However, real tigers were used in certain scenes early on in the film, as when the tiger was swimming for example.

FINAL RATING: 7.5/10

NEXT: Killing Them Softly

New Releases for the Weak of November 23, 2012

LIFE OF PI

(20th Century Fox) Suraj Sharma, Irffan Khan, Gerard Depardieu, Adil Hussain, Rafe Spall, Tabu, Shravanthi Sainath, Andrea Di Stefano, Ayush Tandon, Gautam Belur.  Directed by Ang Lee

Based on a beloved book, this is the story of a young man who escapes from a sinking ship in a terrible storm and embarks on an adventure with the ship’s only other survivor – a Bengal tiger. Director Ang Lee and producer James Cameron team up to produce one of the most unforgettably visual movies of the holiday season.

See the trailer, featurettes and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard, 3D

Genre: Drama

Rating: PG (for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril)

Red Dawn

(FilmDistrict) Chris Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Adrianne Palicki, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. An idyllic small town’s life is shattered by the invasion of North Korean and Chinese forces. A group of young people, led by a marine home on leave, escape the invasion and after witnessing the brutality of the oppressive new regime, take up arms as partisans in a war to retake their country. A remake of the 1984 film of the same name.

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Action

Rating: NR

Rise of the Guardians

(DreamWorks) Starring the voices of Alec Baldwin, Chris Pine, Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher. Legendary immortals Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman must enlist the help of Jack Frost, a somewhat anarchic youth, to battle Pitch, a demonic spirit bent on enslaving the world through his nightmares.

See the trailer, a clip and a featurette here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard, 3D, IMAX 3D

Genre: Animated Feature

Rating: PG (for thematic elements and mildly scary action)

Silver Linings Playbook

(Weinstein) Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver. A man starts over after losing everything and spending eight months in a state institution on a plea bargain. Living at home with his mom and dad, he determines to reunite with his wife. He meets a girl with problems of her own who offers to help him get back together with his wife in exchange for him performing a task very important to her. Things then get pretty complicated from there.

See the trailer, a clip and a promo here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Drama

Rating: R (for language and some sexual content/nudity)