New Releases for the Week of January 8, 2016

THE REVENANT

(20^th Century Fox) Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Paul Anderson, Kristoffer Joner, Joshua Burge. Directed by Alejandro González Iňárritu

Hugh Glass, a legendary explorer of the American frontier, is attacked by a bear and left for dead by his own hunting party. Betrayed by his closest friend, Glass endures incredible odds to recover from his injuries, survive harsh elements and gain vengeance for unendurable grief and pain. The movie opened for an Oscar qualifying run and has garnered laudatory reviews and huge buzz. It’s definitely the movie to see this week.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and featurettes here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Western
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity)

Carol

(Weinstein) Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler. Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel (and said to be auto-biographical), a married woman in the 1950s New York who is trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience falls for an ambitious dreamer of a store clerk. The two embark on an affair in an era when sexual relations between two women was taboo. When the husband discovers her infidelity, the wife is torn between her children and family and a life unfulfilling to her and rebelling against society’s norms to live the life she wants.

See the trailer, clips, interviews, a promo, a featurette and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, Regal Winter Park Village, Regal Waterford Lakes
Rating: R (for a scene of sexuality/nudity and brief language)

The Forest

(Gramercy) Natalie Dormer, Eoin Macken, Stephanie Vogt, Noriko Sakura. An American woman journeys to Tokyo to find her twin sister who had ventured into the Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji and disappeared. She discovers that the forest is notorious for being a place where people commit suicide and their angry and tormented souls haunt the forest. She will have to fight these spirits and the darkness within her to learn the fate of her sister – and survive her own trip into the forest.

See the trailer and a clip here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Horror
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for disturbing thematic content and images)

The Masked Saint

(Freestyle) Brett Granstaff, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Diahann Carroll, Roddy Piper. A former professional wrestler discovers a different calling and retires from the ring to become a small town pastor. However, he finds his flock gripped in the vise of poverty and crime. Donning a mask, he moonlights as a costumed vigilante while trying to evade police and criminals both while reconciling his violent alter ego with his standing as a pastor and family man. Apparently, this is based on a true story.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Faith-Based True Life Drama
Now Playing: AMC Disney Springs, Regal Oviedo Marketplace, Regal Pointe Orlando, UA Seminole Towne Center
Rating: PG-13 (for some violence and thematic elements)

Wazir

(Reliance) Amitabh Bachchan, Farhan Akhtar, Aditi Rao Hydari, John Abraham. Two unlikely friends – one a wheelchair-bound chess grandmaster, the other a fearless police officer – are brought together by mutual grief. The two decide to aid one another in a cat and mouse game against a ruthless opponent lurking in the shadows who seeks to raise the stakes to the ultimate.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Mystery
Now Playing: AMC West Oaks, Touchstar Southchase
Rating: NR

New Releases for the Week of January 8, 2010

Amy Adams decides to pack up her things and head for a movie where an Oscar nomination is at least possible.

LEAP YEAR

(Universal) Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow, Noel O’Donovan, Tony Rohr, Pat Laffan, Alan Devlin. Directed by Anand Tucker

A young woman tires of waiting for her commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose to her. She discovers an old Irish tradition that allows for a woman to propose to a man on Leap Day and, lo and behold, he is going to be in Dublin on Leap Day. She hops on a plane, expecting to be there in plenty of time, but bad airplanes, bad weather and bad luck conspire to strand her on the other side of the Emerald Isle. She enlists the help of a studly local to get her to Dublin on time which paves the way for much bickering, and anybody who’s ever seen a Hollywood romantic comedy knows what that leads to.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Rating: PG (for sensuality and language)

Broken Embraces

(Sony Classics) Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portilla, Rossy de Palma. Legendary Spanish director returns with his latest movie, a thriller about a writer and former movie director who is blinded in a car crash that also takes the life of his lover. Devastated, he adopts the pseudonym that he had been using as a writer and leaves his real name, which he had used as a director, to die in the car crash. Fourteen years later, he is moved to tell the story of his tribulations to a young man who has also been injured in a car crash, and the story moves from being mere entertainment to pass the time to something much deeper…and darker.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Rating: R (for sexual content, language and some drug material)

Daybreakers

(Lionsgate) Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan. When a plague turns the majority of the human population into vampires (take that, Edward Cullen!) the shrinking human population must be captured and farmed for blood. As their food supply dwindles, a substitute for human blood must be found. However, a covert group of vampires discovers something remarkable, something that might just save the human race from extinction.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Rating: R (for strong bloody violence, language and brief nudity)

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

(Sony Classics) Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp. Director Terry Gilliam once again creates a unique and imaginative fantasy. Dr. Parnassus, the owner of a travelling show, carries with him a dark and terrible secret; he made a deal with the devil for immortality in exchange for the soul of his firstborn when she reaches her 16^th birthday. With that date rapidly approaching, Dr. Parnassus renegotiates the deal; the first of the two of them to seduce five souls wins. The good doctor must use every trick up his sleeve to save the soul of his precious daughter. This was Ledger’s last movie before his tragic passing; he had only partially completed filming. The movie was re-written, allowing several actors – including Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – to fill the role for the rest of the action.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Rating: PG-13 (for violent images, some sensuality, language and smoking)

Youth in Revolt

(Dimension) Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi. A somewhat mousy young man falls in love with a free-spirited girl during a family vacation. With geography, family and the girl’s ex-boyfriends all conspiring against him, he decides (with the encouragement of the object of his affections) to create a worldly alter-ego that she can truly fall for. However, the new him goes hopelessly out of control, leading to mayhem and just maybe, love.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Rating: R (for sexual content, language and drug use)