Movies in Theaters This Wednesday, August 27-29, 2014: The November Man, As Above, So Below, and More
After a few action(ish) releases in a row, you’d think we’d get a break. However, starting today (this week kicks off early for some reason) you can get yet another action flick. Don’t worry, though, it’s not your only option!
The movie I’m alluding to is the Pierce Brosnan-starring The November Man. Somehow, this movie already has a sequel moving forward meaning Relativity saw something in the first one before it opened. The November Man is directed by Roger Donaldson (Dante’s Peak) and is available today.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can also see As Above, So Below in wide theaters starting Friday. The found footage horror film stars Ben Feldman (AMC’s Mad Men) as one of the group members exploring catacombs below Paris. It’s safe to say I won’t be seeing this movie but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, that does it for wide releases. This isn’t the most packed weekend for releases but there are some limited ones. The most notable is probably Starred Up (coming out today in New York) starring Jack O’Connell (300: Rise of an Empire) and Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises). This one tells the story of a prisoner that is transferred into a prison with his own father.
The Congress, another limited release, has a notable cast (Robin Wright, Jon Hamm, and Harvey Keitel) that might make the movie worth checking out. I’m also impressed with Life of Crime (which stars Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, and Isla Fisher). Both of these are available Friday, too.
The rest release Friday (with the exception of one) and are The Calling, Canopy, Cantinflas, Jamie Marks is Dead, The Last of Robin Hood, Last Weekend, Life of Crime, The Notebook, Through a Lens Darkly (the one releasing today), and Yellow.
Have a great rest of the week!
Miles of twisting catacombs lie beneath the streets of Paris, the eternal home to countless souls. When a team of explorers ventures into the uncharted maze of bones, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. A journey into madness and terror, As Above, So Below reaches deep into the human psyche to reveal the personal demons that come back to haunt us all.
An ex-CIA operative is brought back in on a very personal mission and finds himself pitted against his former pupil in a deadly game involving high level CIA officials and the Russian president-elect.
Detective Hazel Micallef hasn’t had much to worry about in the sleepy town of Fort Dundas until a string of gruesome murders in the surrounding countryside brings her face to face with a serial killer driven by a higher calling.
Wartime, 1942. Singapore. An Australian fighter pilot shot down in combat awakens suspended in the treetops. As night devours day, he must navigate through dangerous jungle in search of sanctuary. Transcending language and culture, CANOPY is a cinematic tour de force exploring the collision of war, nature and its impact on humanity.
The untold story of Mexico’s greatest and most beloved comedy film star of all time, from his humble origins on the small stage to the bright lights of Hollywood.
Robin Wright, a Hollywood actress who once held great promise (“The Princess Bride”, “Forest Gump”), receives an unexpected offer in mid-life: Mirramount Studios want to scan her entire being into their computers and purchase ownership of her image for an astronomical fee. After she is scanned, the studio will be allowed to make whatever films it wishes with the 3-D Robin, including all the blockbusters she chose not to make during her career. As if that were not inducement enough, the studio promises to keep the new 3D Robin forever young in the movies. She will always be thirty-something, a stunning beauty who never grows old. In return, Robin will receive tons of money but shell be forbidden to appear on any kind of stage for all eternity. Despite her deep internal resistance, Robin eventually signs the contract , since she understand that in the economy of scanned actors, its her only way to stay in the business, but even more crucial, Robin can give her son Aaron, who suffers from a rare disorder, the best treatment money can buy. The contract is valid for 20 years.
Twenty years later, Robin arrives at Abrahama, the animated city composed by Miramount Nagasaki, once a Hollywood studio that signed Robin, and now the exclusive creator of the cinematic dream-world that controls all our emotions, from love and longings to ego and deathly anxieties. Miramount Nagasaki’s chemistry is everywhere, from the air-conditioning to the water sources. During the intervening two decades, the corporation has turned Robin Wright from a Hollywood actress with unfulfilled potential into an international superstar and fantasy. On-screen, she has remained forever young. In the animated world of the future, Miraramount Nagasaki is celebrating a huge gathering in the heart of the desert, “The Futurist Congress.” At the event, Miramount Nagasaki’s genius scientists — once creators of movies, now computer programmers who have evolved into chemists and pharmacists—will declare the next stage in the chemical evolution: free choice! From now on, every viewer can create movies in his own imagination, thanks to chemical selection. Robin Wright is now a mere chemical formula that every person can consume by taking the correct prescription, then staging whatever story they desire: Snow White, personal family dramas, or porn. It’s all in the brain, all through chemicals.
The animated Robin Wright is an “elderly” woman of 66. When she arrives at the congress as the guest of honor, no one recognizes her as the stunning beauty admired by all, a star whose image is broadcast on screens in every corner of the congress. She is lonely, about to become a chemical formula, when out of nowhere, Paramount Nagasaki’s utopian plan is suddenly derailed: the thinking man, the resister, the rebels who have been fighting the deceptive regime of the pharmaceutical world, unite and turn the Futurist Congress into a fatally violent arena. The struggle for clarity of thought becomes a war of independence for the right to imagine. Out of the forgetting and the loss, Robin suddenly regains the ability to choose. Will she go back to living in the world of truth, a gray world devoid of chemistry, where she is an aging, anonymous actress caring for her sick 30-year-old son? Or will she surrender to the captivating lie of the chemical world and remain forever young?
In a wintry small town, the body of a teenager named Jamie Marks is found by the river. Adam, the star of his cross-country team, becomes fascinated with Jamie-a boy nobody really knew or interacted with, except occasionally to bully him. When Jamie’s ghost begins to appear both to Adam and Gracie, the classmate who discovered the body, Adam is caught between two worlds. He has a budding romance with Gracie, but he also feels a deep connection to Jamie, who brings him closer to the world of the undead.
The Last of Robin Hood is the true story of Beverly Aadland, a teen starlet who became the last girlfriend of legendary swashbuckler Errol Flynn. In 1957, Beverly was working at Warner Brothers studios with a fake birth certificate saying she was 18 — she was in fact, only 15 — when she encountered the former matinée idol. After a bumpy start, the two undertook a relationship that was ultimately embraced by Beverly’s Hollywood mother Florence, who became a willing third wheel. The affair took them from L.A. to New York to Africa, then to Cuba where Flynn pitched in with the rebels to make a pro-Castro propaganda movie starring Beverly. It all came crashing to an end in Vancouver, however, when Flynn died in Beverly’s arms, causing an avalanche of publicity; Florence finally achieved the attention she sought in the form of tabloid notoriety but the chaos drove Beverly to the edge of sanity. The Last of Robin Hood is a poignant yet darkly comic coming-of-age tale about the desire for fame and the price it exacts.
In this dark comedy of manners, the action of LAST WEEKEND unfolds over the course of a long Labor Day weekend at the end of the summer at Lake Tahoe, California.
Matriarch Celia Green (Patricia Clarkson) is at a crossroads. She and her husband, Malcolm (Chris Mulkey), are the founders of a fitness empire and among San Francisco’s wealthiest citizens. They have been coming to Lake Tahoe for more than thirty years, and yet Celia now feels that something in her life is missing.
She gathers her two adult sons (Zachary Booth and Joseph Cross) and their partners for a rare weekend together. As the holiday begins, Celia finds herself torn between the house—and the past that it represents—and her desire to move forward with her life.
As the weekend progresses and tensions rise, the four members of the Green family are joined by an eclectic assortment of houseguests and drop-ins, young and old.
On Saturday morning, an accident threatens to unhinge Celia’s meticulously devised weekend: the Greens’ longtime caretaker, Hector Castillo (Julio Oscar Mechoso), is electrocuted as he is fixing a broken light on the dock. When he is airlifted to a nearby hospital, the Green family goes along with him, and the guests on the property are forced to fend for themselves.
Amidst this catastrophe, Celia must decide whether she is ready to let go of the house. LAST WEEKEND is a film about the end of an era for a family—and the steps we must often take in order to create new beginnings.
When a pair of low-level criminals kidnap the wife of a corrupt real-estate developer, they get both more and less than they bargained for in Life of Crime, a dark caper comedy based on legendary author Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch. Starring Jennifer Aniston, John Hawkes, yasiin bey, Mark Boone Junior, Isla Fisher, Will Forte, and Tim Robbins, Life of Crime is packed with the outrageously eccentric characters, black comedy and unexpected twists that earned Leonard a reputation as one of America’s sharpest and funniest crime writers.
Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston), the wife of crooked real-estate developer Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins), is kidnapped by two common criminals (yasiin bey and John Hawkes), who intend to hold her for a $1 million ransom and extort her husband with inside information about his illegal business dealings. But Frank, who is holed up in the Bahamas with his mistress, decides he’d rather not get his wife back, setting off a sequence of double-crosses and plot twists that could only come from the mind of master storyteller Elmore Leonard.
Life of Crime stars Jennifer Aniston (We’re the Millers, Horrible Bosses) yasiin bey (Begin Again, Next Day Air), Isla Fisher (The Great Gatsby, Now You See Me), Will Forte (Nebraska, “Saturday Night Live”), Mark Boone Junior (“Sons of Anarchy,” Memento) with Tim Robbins (Bull Durham) and John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone, Lincoln). The film is written and directed by Daniel Schechter (Goodbye Baby, Supporting Characters), based on the novel The Switch by Elmore Leonard. Producers are Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Lee Stollman, Jordan Kessler, Ashok Amritraj, Michael Siegel and Elizabeth Destro. Executive producers are Elmore Leonard, Jennifer Aniston, Aleen Keshishian, Charles Sauveur Bonan, Kim Leadford, Larry Ladove, James Garavente, Jacob Pechenik, Christopher Herghelegiu and Bryan Mansour.
Twin siblings enduring the harshness of WWII in a village on the Hungarian border hedge their survival on studying and learning from the evil surrounding them.
Eric (Jack O’Connell) is a violent young offender prematurely thrown into the dark world of an adult prison. As he struggles to assert himself against the prison officers and the other inmates, he has to confront his own father, Nev (Ben Mendelsohn); a man who has spent most of his life in jail. As Eric forges allegiances with other prisoners, he learns that his rage can be overcome and discovers the new rules of survival. But there are forces at work which threaten to destroy him.
Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People is a two-hour film that will explore the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present.
Yellow is a searing take on modern society and the demands it makes on people. The film tells the story of Mary Holmes, (Heather Wahlquist), a young substitute teacher who escapes from her drudging everyday life by fantasizing bizarre parallel realities. We enter her hallucinatory world, peopled with Busby Berkeley dancers, Cirque du Soleil, Circus freaks, and human farm animals where nothing is quite what it seems. Yellow is a wildly inventive and visually dazzling head-trip from Cassavetes, whose previous films include The Notebook, John Q, and My Sister’s Keeper.
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