Your Weekend Preview: What To See (And What To Skip) In The Theatres This Weekend

By Original-Cin Staff

The Oscars and Valentine’s Day are gone and movie dump season (a.k.a. January) is over! Now let’s get back to some good movies.

A scene from Call of the Wild.

Domesticity and its discontents is this week’s theme beginning with Ordinary Love (Rating: A) which sees Liam Nelson and Leslie Manville as Tom and Joan, a long-married Belfast couple going through a tough health year, in a film directed by real-life couple, Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn. Reviewer Linda Barnard praises both the carefully observed direction and writing and the “brilliantly layered performances” of the two stars.

Thom Ernst reviews an unnerving indie horror-thriller The Lodge (Rating: A-) from Austrian filmmaking duo Veronica Franz and Severin Fíala, about a couple of children left to spend Christmas with their dad’s enigmatic new fiancé, Grace (Riley Keough), who’s carrying some serious post-traumatic baggage. Thom also reviews Space and Time (Rating: C), a Toronto-set breakup movie between a guy photographer and a woman physicist who imagines their relationship might be better in a parallel universe. (Review includes the best-ever headline by our own Jim Slotek!).

Also, for the Lenten season, we have the Oscar-nominated Polish drama Corpus Cristi (Rating: B+), based on the real story of an ex-con impersonating a village priest. Reviewer Liam Lacey says the film demonstrates how the face of actor Bartosz Bielenia raises the film and its theological issues from ordinary to memorable. Liam also reviews Emma. (Rating: C+) the most recent adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that is the mother of modern romcoms.

Karen Gordon reviews two odd-couple movies, including the Disney adaptation of Jack London’s venerable dog story Call of the Wild (Rating: B), starring a digitally altered St. Bernard as the cur who finds a soulmate in curmudgeonly Harrison Ford. Karen liked the naturalistic tone of Standing Up, Falling Down (Rating: B), a gentle comedy about a failing stand-up comic (Parks and Recreation’s Ben Schwartz) and his friendship with an avuncular dermatologist, played by Billy Crystal.

Until now, dermatologists have almost exclusively been known for their work on the other side of the camera.

Have a well-moisturized weekend.