Your Weekend Preview: What To See (And What To Skip) In The Theatres
By Original-Cin Staff
It’s a beautiful week in the movie neighbourhood with no less than three A-rated films in the lead-up to the American Thanksgiving weekend.
A scene from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
Following last year’s hit documentary about children’s TV host Fred Rogers, we now have the dramatized version A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (Rating: A) starring Tom Hanks (who else?) as the sweater-wearing sage and Matthew Reese as a cynical Esquire journalist who turns into a true believer. Reviewer Jim Slotek praises this playful and moving drama from director Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and notes the current Fred Rogers-inspired films are serving as a kind of collective therapy.
Also this week is Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (Rating: A+), starring Adam Driver as a New York theatre director and Scarlett Johansson as his actress wife, extricating themselves painfully from their marriage, and their constellation of offspring, parents, lawyers and friends with a great cast, including Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta and Wallace Shawn. Our critic Karen Gordon praises the “exquisite” acting and a work that is more serious and tender than anything Baumbach has attempted before.
Runner-up Grand Prize-winner at the Cannes film festival, Atlantics (Rating: A-), says reviewer Liam Lacey, is a beautifully shot and atmospheric romance, ghost story, and political film, about a coming-of-age film about a teenaged girl from Darfur who is left behind when her boyfriend strikes out for Europe with a group of other migrants on an open boat.
For kids, we have Frozen 2 (Rating: B-), the Disney sequel to the billion-dollar-grossing original with the same cast (Kirsten Bell, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gadd) which says Jim Slotek, “should keep the kids’ attention even if it doesn’t break any new ice.”
There’s a lot of buzz for Waves (Rating: B-), Trey Edward Shults’ long and ambitious drama about an African-American family in crisis when 17-year-old high-school son, Tyler, commits a violent crime. Reviewer Liam Lacey says this two-hour-plus emotional beat-down will divide audiences between those who have their hearts torn out, and those who will want to tear out their hair.
Otherwise, we have 21 Bridges (Rating: C+), a police chase/conspiracy actioner in the Serpico dirty cop tradition, starring Chadwick Boseman as a trigger-happy NYPD detective in a viper’s nest of cop-killers, drug dealers and lawmen gone bad. Also implicated are Sienna Miller and J.K. Simmons in a movie that reviewer Jim Slotek writes, goes “boom like a two-hour string of firecrackers.”
Jim Slotek also offers a preview of Blood in the Snow, the annual festival of Canadian horror films, including Puppet Killer, She Never Died, The Nights Before Christmas, Hunter’s Moon and Z, to freeze your blood like maple syrup taffy.
Have a bloody great weekend.