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

Two things you can count on in mid-winter: Big dumps of snow and mediocre movies. An exception this week is Rosie (Rating: B-plus), the Dublin-set movie scripted by Roddy Doyle against the background of that city’s rental housing crisis. 

An excellent Sarah Greene stars as Rosie, a young mother of four, circling the drain of permanent homelessness.  Reviewer Liam Lacey says, “we’re gripped by the tension” of a young mother trying to save her family from harm.

Alice Krige, who’ll always be the Borg Queen to us Trekkers, plays the witch in Gretel and Hansel

Canadian director David Cronenberg has a connection to this year’s award season – Greta Gerwig says that, in her revisionist take on Little Women, she was inspired by the Canadian director’s A History of Violence as an example of “using something that is a movie trope or cliché and then subverting it.” But now there’s also a remake of Cronenberg’s 1977 Rabid, in the theatres this week: Rabid (B-minus) is directed by two women, Jen and Sylvia Soska, who, in another Cronenbergian resonance, are twins. Our reviewer, Thom Ernst, found the result more an “homage” than full-blooded re-think of the horror classic. 

There’s also an historical horror tie-in to Gretel and Hansel (C Plus) -- the director is Oz Perkins, son of the late Tony Perkins, star of Psycho. This Brothers Grimm-inspired tale features a 16-year-old Gretel (Sophia Lillis) with her eight-year-old brother (Sammy Leakey), trekking through the forest (Langley, B.C.) to find shelter in a strange house with a witch (Alice Krige). Though not actually made of gingerbread, the house has a lavish food supply with the result, says reviewer Jim Slotek, the movie makes you more hungry than scared.

Here’s one we didn’t see coming. Blake Lively stars in The Rhythm Section (C) as a sex worker with depressed hair, whose family was killed in a plane crash, and who sets out on a mission of revenge. Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown are also implicated. This one had our reviewer Kim Hughes contemplating some female revenge fantasies of her own.

Finally, for the politically down-hearted, we recommend checking out our reviews of films at The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, a collection of films about filmmakers and other people around the world who put their lives on the line for social justice.

Have an inspirational weekend.