This week’s movie releases
Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton play Grimm siblings in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters Starring Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson, Beautiful Creatures tries to cast a spell of its own
After defrosting zombie Nazis in Dead Snow, Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola takes us on an arguably even sillier ride in Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. The horror comedy imagines the lives of the young Grimm fairytale heroes 15 years on, when, with their childhood witch-burning experience under their belt, the two grown-up siblings, played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, have become crossbows-for-hire out for revenge, dispatching crones with gruesome abandon. Famke Janssen plays a wicked witch who crosses their path.
Also looking to cast a spell this week — especially if it conjures Twilight-sized success — Beautiful Creatures is an adaptation of the first novel in Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s bestselling series. It’s the story of a bookish teenager in a conservative Southern town (Alden Ehrenreich) who hooks up with the mysterious Lena (Alice Englert) after she arrives to stay in uncle Jeremy Irons’ gothic manor. Lena, you see, is a Caster whose 16th birthday — the day her powers will be claimed for the dark or the light — is fast approaching. With Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum.
Family comedy Parental Guidance lures both Billy Crystal and Bette Midler back to the big screen to play grandparents who agree to look after their three grandkids while daughter Marisa Tomei and husband Tom Everett Scott go away on a business trip. They soon find their old-school methods rubbing up against modern behavior patterns.
An Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Film category — it lost out to Michael Haneke’s Amour last Sunday — A Royal Affair is a Danish costume drama set in the 18th-century about the real-life love triangle between the mentally ill King Christian VII, his German doctor (Mads Mikkelsen) and his British-born Queen Caroline Mathilda. The right-on lovers take advantage of the monarch’s delicate mental state to usher through a number of socially progressive reforms.
Directed by Spain’s Antonio Méndez Esparza, Aquí y allá tells the tale of a Mexican immigrant trying to reconnect with his wife and daughters, as well as start a band, when he returns home after years working in the US. The film won the International Critics’ Week prize at last year’s Cannes festival.
My terrifying launderette
El callejón (The alley) is a Spanish-Colombian thriller starring Ana de Armas as a woman penned inside an all-night Laundromat by a serial killer.
And finally, Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed Weekend is a British romantic drama about two men (Tom Cullen and Chris New) who forge a connection over two brief days that will resonate for the rest of their lives.
