Even with The Guest moving into October, there is a metric crap-tonne of movies landing in your local megaplex today. Here is a rough guide. Take notes.
The Boxtrolls: The third stop-motion feature from Laika (after Coraline and ParaNorman) looked awfully fun when I saw a few pieces of it at TIFF Kids last year. Rad approves of the finished product.
Delivery: What does it take to be an expectant father and an aspiring stand-up comedian? Mark Myers’ documentary explores the question; Glenn is not impressed with the answers.
The Equalizer: Denzel Washington and his Training Day director re-team to reboot a half-forgotten ’80s television series as an ultraviolent revenge fantasy where Denzel Washington straight-up murders people a lot. It’s … watchable.
Frontera: Racial prejudice and hidden agendas collide in this low-rent riff on Crash and Babel, which does at least offer some very good acting here and there.
Hector and the Search for Happiness: Simon Pegg tries mightily to sell Francois Lelord’s bullshit pop-psychology, but dear god does this movie not work. The poor guy just shouldn’t make movies without Edgar Wright or J.J. Abrams around, you know?
Moebius: Korea’s clown prince of transgressive cinema returns with an even more audacious piece of crap. For future reference, just remember: “If it’s Kim Ki-duk, you won’t give a fuck.”
The Notebook: Arriving all the way from TIFF 2013, Janos Szasz’ WWII drama confronts the horrors of occupied Hungary through the eyes of a pair of orphaned twins. Rad finds some things about it very powerful, others not so much.
Pride: Take the frame of Billy Elliot and actually include the LGBT angle that movie wouldn’t acknowledge, and you get this TIFF crowd-pleaser with a phenomenal cast (including Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine, Andrew Scott, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton). Susan liked it; I look forward to catching up to it.
The Skeleton Twins: Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig give very good performances in the sort of twinkly indie dramedy that you’ve seen a dozen times before. It’s a little problematic.
20,000 Days on Earth: Nick Cave straddles the line between documentary and fantasy in this delightfully strange project, which could possibly be viewed as a companion piece to Holy Motors through the presence of Quantum Kylie Minogue.
And that, at last, is everything. Oh, except for the re-release of Chris Marker’s Level Five opening at the Lightbox today; I’ll be covering that in a web column for NOW that’s going up later this afternoon. So you have something to look forward to. Isn’t that nice?
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