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Opening this Weekend

Tomb Raider

Love, Simon

7 Days in Entebbe

I Can Only Imagine

Meditation Park

Nostalgia

Ice Dragon:  Legend of the Blue Daisies

Box Office Predictions

  1. Black Panther
  2. Tomb Raider
  3. Love, Simon
  4. A Wrinkle in Time
  5. I Can Only Imagine

What You Should See

I made a deal with myself way back when I first saw the trailer for the new Tomb Raider movie:  If it got good reviews, I would see it right away, if it got bad reviews, I would never see it at all.  Now I know that doesn’t sound very profound or different from how one should normally behave towards a movie of mixed interest, but the thing with movies like Tomb Raider is that I, for a variety of reasons, have very little natural interest in it.  I’m more into straight action movies than adventure movies (like Tomb Raider), I don’t find its star Alicia Vikander a natural choice for the role (even though I do think she’s a really good actress with a strong onscreen presence), and, most of all, it’s a videogame adaptation, and those, almost against all reason, are universally bad.  Still, you have to have hope with these kinds of things.  You have to have hope for entertainment.  You have to have hope with life.

But, it looks like I won’t be going to see Tomb Raider this weekend.  And really, I’m not surprised.

It’s actually a very down week overall for major new movie releases.  7 Days in Entebbe has turned out to be much worse than I thought it would be given the pedigree of the actors involved, and as for I Can Only Imagine?  Poor Dennis Quaid, now relegated to movies like I Can Only Imagine.  Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but Christian movies are no good at anything.  Go back to movies like Frequency, Quaid!  Except nobody’s making movies like Frequency anymore.  On the other hand, and this is easily the week’s bright point for new releases, Love, Simon is getting all kinds of positive attention.  I wouldn’t say you necessarily have to see it in theatres, but it feels like it’ll be one of those movies you should have seen from this year.

Smaller new movie releases for the week include Meditation Park, a movie that looks pretty good but it’s about Chinese people so you probably don’t have to see it (something I say as a Chinaman myself), Nostalgia, which, like 7 Days in Entebbe, has turned out to do shockingly worse among critics than I would have expected it to, and Ice Dragon:  Legend of the Blue Daisies, which… I don’t even know, I couldn’t get past the first few seconds of the trailer.   It looks terrible, by which I mean I can’t get behind its animation style.  Maybe that’s not fair, but it’s not like we’re all made of time to go see movies.  Life is precious.  Or so I’m told.

Oh, and also there’s some French thing going on at Metro Cinema, Le Festival du Film Francais.  Go for the subtitles, stay for the fact that French cinema is actually something you should probably get into.