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Opening this Weekend

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Collateral Beauty

The Wasted Times

This Weekend’s Box Office Predictions

  1. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
  2. Collateral Beauty
  3. Moana
  4. Office Christmas Party
  5. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

What You Should See

There’s a part of me that wants simply to say “Rogue One” and “’nuff said” and just leave it at that, but we wouldn’t leave you hanging like that. Other than that one time. It’s pretty obvious that Rogue One, the new Star Wars movie, is going to be the big release of the week, even if there’s still confusion about what the movie actually is — the story of the rebel group who risked (and probably mostly lost) their lives getting the plans for the original Death Star to the rebellion (so not Episode VIII, so stop asking where Luke, Leia, Rey, Finn, Poe, and BB-8 are) — but the good news is that reviews are coming in pretty positive, so you don’t have to feel bad about wanting to see the movie that everybody else wants to see too.

Also opening this weekend is Collateral Beauty, the latest Will Smith project, and unfortunately thing’s aren’t looking so rosy on that side of the fence. Still, it might be worth it for Will Smith’s acting performance alone. Definitely a flawed movie though. The only other major new release is The Wasted Times, playing only at the downtown Landmark, and while it has yet to make much of a critical mark, the one review widely available (from the Village Voice’s Ren Jender) claims that “the majority of the characters murder or are murdered in short order, so finding someone to root for or a storyline to follow in this strangely empty Shanghai is difficult.” That was a negative review, but I don’t know about you, that kind of makes it sound worth seeing.

We should probably also mention the series of classic Christmas movies playing in and around this upcoming weekend, including Home Alone, Elf, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and The Polar Express, all at Metro Cinema, as well as the many movies that will be opening on Wednesday, the 21st, including Sing, Passengers, Assassin’s Creed, and Bullets Russes, because Christmas always screws with the movie release schedule.

And finally, once again, Theater of Life, a documentary on food waste and feeding the hungry, will be opening on Friday, the 23rd and will run through to the 28th at Metro Cinema. We’ll have our review of it up in the next few days in one of those rare and delicious occasions where we’re providing a review before a movie is released. I guess that’s why we’ve been talking about it so much, but, it also looks pretty good and may be an especially good movie to see around Christmas time too.

Theater of Life (Trailer) from NFB/marketing on Vimeo.