Almost one year removed from the slap heard round the world at the Oscars, Smith shows up in a film that’s just as brutally violent in tone as the very thing he turned down years prior for being too “vengeful”, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
Ben Foster
For her first fictional feature since 2010’s Winter’s Bone (and only her fourth feature in the past fifteen years), director Debra Granik mounts an even further internalized depiction of pain, emotional suffering, and unwavering love with the austere, but heart-wrenching father-daughter drama Leave No Trace.
Writer and director Scott Cooper’s Hostiles isn’t one of the worst films ever made, but it’s one of the worst kinds of films: a self-important, plodding, and basic diatribe about the negative impact of Colonialism that’s too wrapped up in its own sense of personal accomplishment and air of ennui that it doesn’t realize how it’s conforming to negative stereotypes instead of subverting them.
The sundrenched and dirt-caked crime drama Hell or High Water doesn’t break a lot of new ground when it comes to modern day neo-noir, and it doesn’t need to.
New arrivals on Blu-ray and DVD this week: Jason Statham stars as the assassin Arthur in the remake of The Mechanic; Kat Dennings plays a sardonic teenager in lust opposite Reece Thompson in Daydream Nation; and Anthony Hopkins takes on the powers of the devil in The Rite.
With fall slowly taking shape around us, the theatres are packed with new movies this weekend, including the sci-fi thriller Surrogates; the musical remake, Fame; the spacey horror film, Pandorum; Trailer Park Boys Countdown To Liquor Day; plus the dramas The Boys Are Back, and Coco avant Chanel open in limited release.