Happy New Year, friends! It has been quite a while since there’s been any activity on the site, and during the busiest time of the movie year at that. I’m sorry for the unexpected silence, but it should be smooth sailing from here on out. In any case, here we are now at the first movie weekend of the new year (there were no new releases on January 1). It’s going to be a fairly quiet, with only one new wide release and one major expansion.
The weekend’s sole new wide release is the supernatural horror film The Forest, from first-time director Jason Zada. Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) plays a young woman who travels to Japan to look for her missing twin in the country’s infamous “Suicide Forest” — only to find herself surrounded by innumerable nasty spirits. January tends to see at least one low-budget supernatural horror film — such a fun, dead-of-winter tradition! — probably because those can turn a profit with even marginal box office success, and this year is no exception. Early reviews have been brutal, but that doesn’t usually make too much a difference for horror films. I love horror, so I’ll definitely be checking it out this weekend. Look for this, in fact, to be my first full-length review since before The Silence.
The biggest story of the week for film-lovers like you and me, however, will surely be the expansion of The Revenant, finally opening nationwide after two weeks of screening exclusively in New York and L.A. Everything about this movie makes me drool. It’s the latest film from the reigning Oscar winner for Best Picture and Best Director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, Babel). It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy as 19th-century frontiersmen. The cinematography is by god-among-men DP Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity, The Tree of Life), who shot this (in sequence!) in the Alberta wilderness using only natural lighting. The trailers are jaw-dropping. I’ve heard that there’s an extended bear attack that was edited to look like one long, unbearable shot using the stitching technique from Birdman, and it’s by all accounts one of the most extraordinary scenes of any movie this year. By this point, you won’t be shocked to know that this is unquestionably my most-anticipated film of the year. I’ve already bought my ticket.
Opening in limited release this weekend is The Masked Saint, and the official description is so bonkers that I’ll just leave it right here: “The Masked Saint follows the journey of former professional wrestler Chris Samuels, who retires from the ring to settle down as a small town pastor. When the pastor witnesses rampant problems in the community, he decides to moonlight as a masked vigilante fighting the injustice. While facing crises at home and at the church, the Pastor must evade the police and somehow reconcile his secret, violent identity with his calling as a pastor.” I’m the target audience for neither wrestling nor Christian films, but this sounds so insane that I kind of want to see it. It’s also based on a true story.
Additional specialty releases include The Treasure, a Romanian film that won a prize at Cannes, and Anesthesia, written and directed by actor Tim Blake Nelson and starring Sam Waterston as a professor who survives a violent mugging.
What are you seeing this weekend? (Your answer should be The Revenant.)
