This week’s movie releases
From Spanish ‘Witching and Bitching’ to a frothy return to France for Michel Gondry
One of the Spanish Inquisition's most infamous persecutions forms the background to Alex de la Iglesia's latest, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi, or Witching and Bitching, to use its crasser English-language title. The Basque witch trials of the early 17th century were the biggest of their kind ever mounted: thousands of people were investigated and 11 were eventually burnt at the stake for alleged occult activity, principally around the Navarre town of Zugarramurdi, close to the border with France. Set in the present day, De la Iglesia's comedy horror finds a coven of cannibal witches — Carmen Maura, Carolina Bang and Terele Pávez — still casting spells in the area, where they encounter a pair of thieves, played by Mario Casas and Hugo Silva, fleeing the authorities, and Silva's ex-wife, after carrying out a robbery in Madrid.
Based on a graphic novel, 2 Guns pairs Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg in an action comedy about a DEA agent and a Naval Intelligence Officer both working undercover to snare the same Mexican drug lord. The twist? Neither one knows the other is an agent. Cue muchos mix-ups, betrayals and violence. The film marks the second teaming between Wahlberg and Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur after last year's Contraband.
Moving from Iceland to Norway, Kon-Tiki dramatizes Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl's famous 1947 voyage from Peru to the Polynesian Islands in a flimsy balsa-wood raft to show how pre-Columbian peoples may have colonized the South Pacific. Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen stars as the explorer, who filmed his own journey in an Oscar-winning 1950 documentary.
In the 'Mood'
The quirky Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) returns to his native France for Mood Indigo, an adaptation of Boris Vian's cult 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream. Set in a beautifully conceived surreal Paris, it stars Romain Duris as a man forced to give up his boho life to pay for partner Audrey Tautou's costly treatments when she develops the life-threatening, if poetic-sounding, condition of a lily on the lung.
Made four years ago but only seeing the inside of Spanish theaters now, Solitary Man stars an on-form Michael Douglas as a one-time successful car dealer struggling to get back on his feet after losing everything through his own duplicitous nature. The attractive cast features Mary-Louise Parker, Jenna Fischer, Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito and The West Wing's Richard Schiff.
