New Releases for the Week of August 18, 2017

THE HITMAN’S BODYGUARD

(Summit) Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Elodie Yung, Richard E. Grant, Joaquim de Almeida, Sam Hazeldine. Directed by Patrick Hughes

A vicious dictator is going on trial in front of the international court and only one man can put him away – one of the world’s most successful assassins. However, the ex-fearless leader has put out a hit on the hitman and things don’t look good for him to make it to the trial. A bodyguard is assigned to the killer and it has to be said the two don’t exactly hit it off but if they are going to survive they’ll have to put aside their differences or die in a really spectacular fashion.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Action Comedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for strong violence and language throughout)

Brigsby Bear

(Sony Classics) Kyle Mooney, Mark Hamill, Jane Adams, Greg Kinnear. The children’s television show Brigsby Bear Adventures has been playing for an audience of one – James. When the show abruptly ends, James is motivated to finish the story himself taking him into a land of imagination he never knew he had within him.

See the trailer, clips and an interview here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Comedy
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, AMC Disney Springs, Barnstorm Theater, Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, brief sexuality, drug material and teen partying)

Dawson City: Frozen Time

(Kino Lorber) Bill Morrison, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, Kathy Jones-Gates, Michael Gates. In 1978, a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot in Dawson City, a former gold rush town in the Yukon and discovered a cache of over 500 films that had been buried there since the silent film era. Many of the films had been thought to be lost forever. After an extensive restoration process, the newsreels and films are ready to be shown to the public, depicting an era in history and in Dawson City itself that is long gone. This film has been described as being like stepping into a time capsule.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: NR

Leap!

(Weinstein) Starring the voices of Elle Fanning, Dane DeHaan, Carly Rae Jepsen, Maddie Ziegler. An orphan girl who dreams of being a prima ballerina travels from Brittany to Paris to follow her dream. A case of mistaken identity leads her to become a pupil at the Grand Opera House in a Paris that is full of enchantment, music and magic.

See the trailer and a clip here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Animated Feature
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG (for some impolite humor and action)

Logan Lucky

(Bleecker Street) Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes. Two brothers, cursed by bad luck all their lives, attempt to steal a windfall of cash from the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Enlisting the aid of Joe Bang, one of the great demolition experts of all time, they merely have to break him out of prison where he is in-car-cer-rated and then get him back inside without anyone noticing. Piece of cake. Incidentally, this is Steven Soderburgh’s return to the big screen in like four years. Think of this as the unholy love child of The Dukes of Hazzard, <em and Oceans 11.

See the trailer, clips and featurettes here.
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Action Comedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for language and some crude comments)

Lost in Paris

(Oscilloscope Laboratories) Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Emmanuelle Riva, Pierre Richard. Fiona visits Paris for the first time in her life to assist her Aunt Martha. Fiona has always repressed her feelings but when she meets Dom, a homeless man who is absolutely unafraid of expressing his feelings or his thoughts. The City of Lights will never be the same.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Dramedy
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: NR

Step

(Fox Searchlight) Paula Dofat, Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger, Tayla Solomon. This documentary follows a step dancing team from inner city Baltimore as they embark on competitions throughout the city and navigate their senior year in high school.

See the trailer, clips and a featurette here.
For more on the movie this is the website
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: AMC Disney Springs, Cinemark Artegon Marketplace, Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: PG (for thematic elements and some language)

Turn it Around: The Story of East Bay Punk

(Abramorama) Billy Joe Armstrong, Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra, Laurence Livermore. San Francisco has always been the center of the Bay Area music scene. For a brief shining moment, a group of committed men and women ran a punk co-op out of a former warehouse in Berkeley that became a creative cauldron that changed the face of punk music – and pop culture – forever and put the East Bay in the forefront of the Bay Area musical firmament.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Musical Documentary
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: NR

Wind River

(Weinstein) Jeremy Renner, Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Elizabeth Olsen. A grisly murder scene is discovered on a Native American tribal reservation. An FBI agent is called in to investigate and he ends up teaming with a veteran game tracker to run the killer to ground.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, AMC Disney Springs, Amstar Lake Mary, Cinemark Artegon Marketplace, Regal Waterford Lakes, Regal Winter Park Village, Rialto Spanish Springs
Rating: R (for strong violence, a rape, disturbing images, and language)

ALSO OPENING IN ORLANDO/DAYTONA:

Bareilly Ki Barfi
Fairy Tale: Dragon Cry
From the Land of the Moon
Imperfections
Shot Caller

ALSO OPENING IN MIAMI:

Anando Brahma
Fairy Tale: Dragon Cry
Menashe
Once Upon a Time 3D
The Only Living Boy in New York
The Untamed
Whose Streets?

ALSO OPENING IN TAMPA:

6 Days
Anando Brahma
The Ancient Magus Bride
Bareilly Ki Barfi
Fairy Tale: Dragon City
The Midwife
Shot Caller

ALSO OPENING IN JACKSONVILLE:

68 Kill
Anando Brahma
The Ancient Magus Bride

SCHEDULED FOR REVIEW:

68 Kill
Brigsby Bear
Dawson City: Frozen in Time
The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Logan Lucky
Menashe
The Only Living Boy in New York
Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk
Whose Streets?
Wind River

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ARQ

Time after time.

(2016) Science Fiction (Netflix) Robbie Amell, Rachael Taylor, Shaun Benson, Gray Powell, Jacob Neayem, Adam Butcher, Tantoo Cardinal, Jamie Spichuk. Directed by Tony Elliott

 

There are times in our lives where we all want a do-over. What if you had to do over the same three hours and every time you did, you still managed to muck it up?

Renton (Amell), a scientist, wakes up with a gasp. He is in bed with his former flame Hannah (Taylor) when masked men barge into their bedroom. And as things turn out, Renton ends up dead on the floor. But then he wakes up again.

He quickly realizes he’s caught in a time loop, one which is lasting precisely three hours, fourteen minutes and fifteen seconds (math majors will get the significance). It’s the near future and in this dystopian vision, a single corporation essentially rules Earth. Renton has been working on a new energy source that will break the hold of said evil corporation and save the planet – the air is already unbreathable.

The baddies want to confiscate Renton’s experiment and kill the inventor of the device that can threaten their employer’s stranglehold on the world and it seems they are succeeding but Renton remembers what is going on from loop to loop and Hannah is beginning to too. Can the two of them figure out how to break out of the loop and use the device Renton has invented to buy freedom from corporate tyranny?

This is a bare bones Canadian production that doesn’t utilize a whole lot of effects or a lot of cast. It mostly takes place in several rooms of a single house, and of course there are no costume changes. Still, one gets the sense of a large budget than what they likely had. Kudos should go to the production design crew for making this look apocalyptic and futuristic without resorting to a whole lot of CGI.

Amell has mostly a lot of small screen experience and that’s fine for something like this that is destined mainly for streaming and home viewing. His performance is solid but not as inspiring as I would have liked in a character like his. I’ve enjoyed his work on TV but he hasn’t yet shown that he can take a feature and carry it yet. Taylor is more intriguing here, but to be fair she has a lot more to work with than Amell, whose character is essentially sci-fi dystopian hero 101.

Like most movies set in a time loop (the most famous being Groundhog Day) there is a certain amount of repetitiveness here that is inevitable. Some movies with this theme handle it better than others; this one is definitely on the lower end of the scale in that regard. The middle third of the movie feels a bit like a slog in places.

Still, as Netflix entertainment goes there is a certain amount of niche filling that this satisfies. Those who like sci-fi and time travel conundrums will probably end up liking this as well. Mainstream audiences may be less enthusiastic but Amell is hunky, Taylor is gorgeous and the baddies are nasty enough to make this a worthwhile investment of time for certain Netflix subscribers.

REASONS TO GO: There are some interesting concepts here.
REASONS TO STAY: As with many time travel films, there is a lot of repetition.
FAMILY VALUES:  A fair amount of violence and some sensuality.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT:  The film played at the Toronto Film Festival before opening on Netflix.
BEYOND THE THEATER: Netflix
CRITICAL MASS: As of 10/11/16: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Synchronicity
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Blair Witch