Movies in Theaters This Friday, April 26, 2013: The Big Wedding, Pain & Gain, Mud, and More
Last weekend, Oblivion dominated the box office. This week, it’ll have two wide releases to fend off to stay king of the hill. Challenging Oblivion will be Michael Bay’s (I almost said low-budget) Pain & Gain. Starring Mark Whalberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (his third movie of this short year), it’s about body builders trying to extort money from a billionaire a-hole.
The Big Wedding is the second wide release. It stars some of our older favorites (Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, and Robin Williams).
In limited release, there are (like always) plenty of choices. Kon-Tiki probably has the most hype behind it. It was selected and nominated for an Academy Award at the end of last year for Best Foreign Film. The historical drama is Norwegian.
Another looker is Jeff Nichols’ Mud. Nichols is another one of those directors everyone should know but probably don’t. As a huge fan of Take Shelter, I am excited to see what Mud has to offer. It stars Matthew McConaughey and screened earlier at Cannes (where it was up for Palme d’Or) and Sundance.
The rest of the limited releases are An Oversimplication of Her Beauty, Arthur Newman, Graceland, Midnight’s Children, Mortem, The Numbers Station, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Sun Don’t Shine, and Tai Chi Hero.
With an all-star cast lead by Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams, Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried and Topher Grace, THE BIG WEDDING is an uproarious romantic comedy about a charmingly modern family trying to survive a weekend wedding celebration that has the potential to become a full blown family fiasco. To the amusement of their adult children and friends, long divorced couple Don and Ellie Griffin (De Niro and Keaton) are once again forced to play the happy couple for the sake of their adopted son’s wedding after his ultra conservative biological mother unexpectedly decides to fly halfway across the world to attend. With all of the wedding guests looking on, the Griffins are hilariously forced to confront their past, present and future – and hopefully avoid killing each other in the process.
From acclaimed director Michael Bay comes “Pain and Gain,” a new action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie. Based on the unbelievable true story of a group of personal trainers in 1990s Miami who, in pursuit of the American Dream, get caught up in a criminal enterprise that goes horribly wrong.
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
You’ve just arrived home after a bad day. You’re broke and lonely, even though you live in the biggest and busiest city in America. You do, however, have one cause for mild optimism: you seem to have captured the attention of an intriguing young lady. You’ve rushed home to clean your apartment before she comes over. In your haste, you see that you’ve missed a call. There’s a voice mail; she tells you that she won’t be seeing you tonight.
With arresting insight, vulnerability, and a delightful sense of humor, Terence Nance’s explosively creative debut feature, AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY, documents the relationship between Terence and a lovely young woman (Namik Minter) as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Utilizing a tapestry of live action and various styles of animation, Terence explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind during a singular moment in time.
Dante Ariola’s feature debut Arthur Newman stars Colin Firth as Wallace Avery, a man so tired of his own life that he fakes his death and hits the road with a doctored ID and a new name. Along the way he befriends Mike (Emily Blunt), a troubled young woman with whom he has more in common than he ever expected. The couple head for a job opportunity, slowly learning to trust each other along the way.
In this unpredictable and tightly-paced thriller, family man Marlon Villar — a longtime chauffeur to corrupt Filipino politician Manuel Chango — is faced with an unthinkable predicament when he is ambushed while driving both his boss’s and his own daughter home from school one afternoon. In the chaos of the kidnapping attempt, things go horribly awry and Marlon’s daughter is taken and held for ransom instead. Desperate to save his daughter, Marlon must navigate the conflicting motives between the ruthless kidnappers, untrustworthy Chango and determined detectives eager to name him a suspect without letting on the wrong girl was taken hostage. As events spin wildly out of control, Marlon, Chango and their families are forced into a rapid downward spiral of deceit and betrayal that will leave no one innocent.
On the 28th of april 1947, Thor Heyerdahl leaves his wife and children behind to cross the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft called ‘Kon-Tiki’, with five inexperienced crew members. The Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer travels on the raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove that people from South-America settled in Polynesia instead of people from Asia, as was believed at the time. The crew did not pack any modern technology on board of the raft, except for a simple radio, and were companied by only each other and a parrot. With the world media watching, the crew navigates the Kon-Tiki across the Pacific Ocean using the stars and being driven by the currents and wind.
While taking on thunder storms, sharks and the dangers of the wide open sea, it’s six brave men against nature trying to get the Kon-Tiki across to the Polynesian shore. After gambling all he has, including his marriage, Heyerdahl is determined to succeed. Thor Heyerdahl’s documentary over the journey won an Oscar in 1951 and is the only Norwegian movie to have won an Oscar to date. The book Heyerdahl wrote about the Kon-Tiki expedition was translated into 70 languages and has sold over 50 million copies over the entire world.
“Born in the hour of India’s freedom. Handcuffed to history.”
Midnight’s Children is an epic film from Oscar-nominated director Deepa Mehta, based on the Booker Prize winning novel by Salman Rushdie. At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, as India proclaims independence from Great Britain, two newborn babies are switched by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. Saleem Sinai, the illegitimate son of a poor woman, and Shiva, the offspring of a wealthy couple, are fated to live the destiny meant for each other. Their lives become mysteriously intertwined and are inextricably linked to India’s whirlwind journey of triumphs and disasters.From the unlikely romance of Saleem’s grandparents to the birth of his own son, Midnight’s Children is a journey at once sweeping in scope and yet intimate in tone. Hopeful, comic and magical – the film conjures images and characters as rich and unforgettable as India herself.
With MORTEM Eric ATLAN signed the story of JENA, a young woman who defies her own death.
JENA is like thousands of people passing by, without knowing her next life. It is on the way to her death that she will cross her mind
-But who are You?
-I am You
During this initiation night, will JENA find the strength to choose her destiny ?
“Mud” is an adventure about two boys, Ellis and his friend Neckbone, who find a man named Mud hiding out on an island in the Mississippi. Mud describes fantastic scenarios—he killed a man in Texas and vengeful bounty hunters are coming to get him. He says he is planning to meet and escape with the love of his life, Juniper, who is waiting for him in town. Skeptical but intrigued, Ellis and Neckbone agree to help him. It isn’t long until Mud’s visions come true and their small town is besieged by a beautiful girl with a line of bounty hunters in tow.
After his latest mission goes disastrously wrong, veteran CIA black ops agent Emerson Kent is given one last chance to prove he still has what it takes to do his job. His new assignment: guarding Katherine, a code operator at a top-secret remote CIA “Numbers Station” where encrypted messages are sent and received. When an elite team of heavily armed assailants lays siege to the station, Emerson and Katherine suddenly find themselves in a life-or-death struggle against an unknown enemy. With the station compromised and innocent lives at stake, they must stop the deadly plot before it’s too late.
Mohsin Hamid’s international best-seller concerning a Pakistani Princeton graduate whose life is forever altered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks arrives on the screen courtesy of celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!). Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) was a bright Wall Street business analyst working under the influential Jim Cross (Kiefer Sutherland) when two passenger jets brought down the World Trade Center as he watched in horror. His American Dream shattered alongside his future with the radiant Erica (Kate Hudson), Khan is suddenly branded an enemy in the land he called home. The humiliation of being wrongfully arrested, profiled, and interrogated soon drives Khan back to his family in Pakistan. There, Khan’s eloquence and charisma make him a natural leader among the anti-American student population, but a potential threat in the eyes of the U.S. government. Years later, American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber) tracks down Khan in Lahore to interview him about a foreign professor who has been abducted by extremists, and threatened with execution. Recognizing the danger to his family, and well aware that Lincoln has a hidden agenda, the man who slowly became the victim of his own cruel fate recounts the story of his profound and unexpected transformation, and the devastating repercussions it threatens to have on everything he holds sacred. Martin Donovan and Om Puri also star
The sun is blaring white. The air is thick as water. Behind the mangroves and swamp grass, a man and a woman fight like animals. There’s trouble in the trunk. The cause of the commotion is unclear. The woman (rising indie star Kate Lyn Sheil) passes out in the muck and the man (Kentucker Audley) sets to driving shirtless before they reveal anything. With the heat so palpable and the landscape a teeming jungle that’s creepily calm, the whole thing could be a fever dream. Many moments in Sun Don’t Shine have an ethereal quality—a shirt flutters away from a car window, the sounds of the world melt into noise. But this is the danger-tinged dreaminess of Badlands, and the film truly grips you by carving vivid details out of an authentic Southern locale.
Lu Chan (Jayden Yuan) is still trying to find his place in Chen Village, the legendary town where everyone is a martial arts master…and Chen-style Tai Chi is forbidden to outsiders. But since he helped save the town from a frightening steam-powered machine, Yuniang (Angelababy), beautiful daughter of Grandmaster Chen (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), agrees to marry Lu Chan and bring him into the family. It’s only a formality, though – she is the teacher, and he is the student – and that suits Lu Chan just fine, as the mutant horn on his head gives him incredible kung-fu power, but leaves him dumber each time, and closer to death.
Chen Village still stands in the shadow of danger. A prodigal brother returns, Lu Chan’s presence invokes a curse on the town, and Yuniang’s scorned fiancée has an appetite for revenge, as well as some new partners in crime.
The second in a trilogy from the creators of IP MAN and DETECTIVE DEE, and featuring action directed by the legendary Sammo Hung, TAI CHI HERO is a full-on, steampunk-infused, video game-influenced kung fu throwdown that will knock you out of your seat.
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