New Releases for the Week of February 12, 2016

DEADPOOL

(20^th Century Fox) Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Gina Carano, Ed Skrein, Lesley Uggams, Greg LaSalle, Taylor Hickson. Directed by Tim Miller

This is not your daddy’s superhero movie – although it might just end up being your daddy. Wade Wilson is a mercenary with a particular set of skills…oh, not that tired old movie again. But Wade has a big problem – it’s cancer and it’s everywhere in his body. Things don’t look good for our good ol’ buddy Wade – until a mysterious man recruiting for a mysterious agency makes a proposal that Wade might not be able to turn down. One of the hotly anticipated movies of the year.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and promos here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard (3D, IMAX 3D)
Genre: Superhero
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for strong violence and language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity)

Fitoor

(UTV) Katrina Kaif, Tabu, Aditya Roy Kapoor, Aditi Rao Hydari. A Bollywood take on the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. A young street boy in Kashmir falls in love with an upper class girl but the girl’s mother conspires to keep the young lovebirds apart.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Romance
Now Playing: AMC Loew’s Universal Cineplex, AMC West Oaks, Touchstar Southchase
Rating: PG-13 (for sexual content and some thematic issues)

How to Be Single

(New Line/MGM) Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson, Damon Wayans Jr., Leslie Mann. A group of young unmarrieds in the Big Apple cope with the vagaries of the dating scene in a digital world as well as the sometimes confusing rules of behavior between the sexes.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Comedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for sexual content and strong language throughout)

The Lady in the Van

(TriStar) Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, Jim Broadbent, Roger Allam. Playwright and television presenter Alan Bennett is annoyed to discover an elderly woman living in her van in his driveway. Grudgingly, he allows her to stay, a decision that will change both their lives.

See the trailer and clips here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard, 3D, IMAX 3D
Genre: True Life Drama
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: PG-13 (for a brief unsettling image)

Tumbledown

(Starz Digital Media) Jason Sudeikis, Rebecca Hall, Dianna Agron, Blythe Danner. The widow of an iconic folksinger finds it hard to move on and retreats to the woods of Maine. When a brash New York writer approaches her with the proposal of writing his biography, she is at first cool to the idea but the more she allows him to write his story, the more she heals.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Now Playing: AMC Loew’s Universal Cineplex
Rating: R (for a sex scene)

Where to Invade Next

(Drafthouse) Michael Moore, Tim Walker, Kirsta Kiuru. Professional gadfly and documentarian Moore turns his eye to the American dream and how it seems to be alive and well – and living in other places around the globe. He comes up with ways that dream is being pursued, and how the ideas that other countries have used can work here.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: R (for language, some violent images, drug use and brief graphic nudity)

Zoolander 2

(Paramount) Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Penelope Cruz, Will Ferrell. Down on his heels and irrelevant, supermodel Derek Zoolander gets back in the game in more way than one when a mysterious Interpol agent discloses that the world’s most beautiful celebrities are turning up dead – with Zoolander’s famous “blue steel” look on their faces. Lucky bastards

See the trailer and a clip here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Comedy
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for crude and sexual content, a scene of exaggerated violence, and brief strong language)

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Pick of the Litter – January 2016

BLOCKBUSTER OF THE MONTH

The Hateful Eight

(Weinstein) Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern. Quentin Tarantino’s eighth movie opens for the general public after an Academy qualifying run in New York and L.A. starting on Christmas Day. A bounty hunter bringing in a dangerous woman wanted for murder to be hanged in a small Colorado town is caught in a blizzard in a stagecoach stop in the Rockies. There, he finds a number of other characters, most up to no good in typical Tarantino fashion – and all connected in an unexpected way, also in Tarantino fashion. If you love this director’s body of work as I do, you too will be chomping at the bit for this one to arrive. January 8

INDEPENDENT PICKS

Diablo

(Orion) Scott Eastwood, Walton Goggins, Camila Belle, Danny Glover. Westerns have been making something of a comeback of late, and there have been some very good ones hitting both the indie circuit and the big theaters. This one is about a man with a violent past who is provoked when his wife is kidnapped from their home. He goes after them with a vengeance, knowing that he might have to become something terrible in order to save her. Clint’s son does his first Western, and it looks like a good one. January 8

Yosemite

(Monterrey Media) James Franco, Henry Hopper, Steven Wiig, Barry Del Sherman. Set in 1985 in the wilds of Northern California, a mountain lion has been blamed for the disappearance of a young boy. One of his friends, whose parents are in the midst of a break-up, determines to hunt the lion and exact justice for the death of his friend. Out on the festival circuit, this has already been compared to Stand by Me as maybe the finest coming of age film of this generation which is high praise indeed. January 8

The Lady in the Van

(Sony Classics) Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, Dominic Cooper, Claire Foy. Playwright Alan Bennett gave a transient woman who lived in her broken-down van permission to stay in his driveway for a few weeks while she got the van repaired. That stay turned into fifteen years; this (mostly) true story shows the relationship between the two which grew over the years, and gives the background on the woman much of which Bennett found out only after she passed away. Smith’s performance has been raved about by the British press. January 15

Beauty and the Beast

(Lionsgate) Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux, André Dussollier, Eduardo Noriega. This tale as old as time is something of a national treasure in France, where it has been made several times into cinematic gold. This latest version is a sumptuous retelling of the famous fairy tale with Bond girl Seydoux as Beauty and French superstar Cassel as the Beast. Gorgeous sets and eye-popping visual effects make this version, which played in France in 2014, one to keep an eye out for. However, this may end up going direct-to-home video so be warned. January 20

Terminus

(Vertical) Jai Koutrae, Kendra Appleton, Todd Lasance, Bren Foster. The world is falling apart. Starvation is rampant, and we stand on the brink of nuclear war. Then, in a small town in the middle of America, an asteroid falls, causing a working class man to crash his truck, but strangely he has not a scratch on him. And he begins to build something odd. The world is ending…or is it really beginning? January 22

 

Jane Got a Gun

(Weinstein) Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Noah Emmerich. Actually keeping my fingers crossed that this is at long last finally going to see the light of day. This film, directed by Gavin O’Connor, (Warrior) is about a former bad girl turned good whose family has run afoul of a vicious gang. In desperation, she turns to a gunslinger for help – a gunslinger she once was intimate with. The movie has been completed for something like three years; it has been repeatedly bounced down the schedule and has even changed distributors. The buzz around it had always been very high and with Westerns doing particularly well right now, this might be the right time for it to finally appear on your local art house screen. January 29