Your weekend preview: What to see (and what to skip) in the theatres this week

Christmas, or maybe St. Patrick’s Day, is arriving early for film lovers.

The film of the week is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic The Irishman  (Rating: A). It brings together Al Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, Joe Pesci as crime boss, Russell Bufalino, and Robert De Niro as the titular Frank Sheeran, a union organizer and mob enforcer whose haunted memoir serves as the spine of the story.  Reviewer Liam Lacey says to catch this grandly-immersive film in the theatres before it goes to Netflix if you can, watch De Niro and the rest of the cast do some of their best acting in years.

De Niro: Funny, that doesn’t sound Irish.

Jim Slotek wonders whether we really need a sequel to the Stanley Kubrick classic, The Shining, especially one involving characters with super-powers? Doctor Sleep  (C plus). In The Shining, a lot was left to the imagination; the new movie, starring Ewan McGregor as a grown-up Danny, does too much explaining.

For Remembrance Day, we have Roland Emmerich’s war drama, Midway  (B minus) which follows the 1942 three-day battle near the Midway atoll in June, 1942 which was a turning point in the Pacific war. Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Jake Weber and Aaron Eckhart star in a solid, if conventional war flick. 

Come for the stilted family drama, stay for the scenery says Liam Lacey of Frankie (C-plus). Ira Sachs’ drama stars Isabelle Huppert as a famous French actress, along with a multi-national cast including Marisa Tomei and Brendan Gleason, set near the  historic Portuguese town of Sintra.

Author Margaret Atwood, at 80 is enjoying a peak moment of fame and influence with two TV series and Booker Prize win. She’s the never-at-a-loss-for-words subject of the celebratory documentary, Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power (B plus). 

Word up for the weekend!