This week’s movie releases
Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix star in ‘The Immigrant,’ a tale of 1920s New York
Director James Gray takes the emotionally charged portraits of underworld New York he drew in The Yards and 1980s-set We Own the Night further back in time in The Immigrant. Marion Cotillard stars as a Polish migrant who gets separated from her tuberculosis-infected sister while entering the US through Ellis Island. Alone in Roaring Twenties Manhattan, she’s lured into a world of prostitution by caddish-but-charismatic Joaquin Phoenix until his stage magician cousin, played by Jeremy Renner, appears to try to conjure her a way out.
A new English-language effort from Spain’s Isabel Coixet (Elegy, The Secret Life of Words), Another Me is a psychological thriller starring Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner as a teen who fears she is being stalked by an evil double out to rob not just her identity but her entire life. Shot in Barcelona and Cardiff, it also features Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Claire Forlani, Rhys Ifans, Ivana Baquero and Geraldine Chaplin.
Another Spanish director dipping his toe into English-language cinema this week, in his case for the first time, is Paco Cabezas (Carne de neón) with Nicolas Cage vehicle Rage. Cage stars as a businessman whose seemingly perfect life, wife, family, home and job come under threat when his criminal past catches up with him and Russian mobsters kidnap his daughter. Danny Glover also stars.
There’s more crime action in self-conscious noir The Bag Man, which stars John Cusack as a guy hired by kingpin Robert De Niro to transport a bag to a seedy motel and wait for him. But a cast of crazy characters, including wheelchair-using motel owner Crispin Glover and prostitute Rebecca Da Costa, is soon complicating his mission.
After The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore reunite for a third romantic comedy with Blended. The pair star as two single parents who vow never to meet again after a catastrophic date, only to wind up on the same dream African safari trip with their respective offspring.
Staying Hooked
The Pirate Fairy is Disney’s fifth installment in its Tinker Bell series. Here Peter Pan’s petite pal sets off with her friends to seek a rogue dust-keeper fairy who’s run off and fallen in with a gang of pirates led by the future Captain Hook (voiced by Tom Hiddleston).
Definitely not for kids, Spanish director Gabriel Velázquez’s ärtico, a prize winner at Berlin, shows the seedier side of Salamanca in a tale of two junkies, Jota (Víctor García) and Simón (Juanlu Sevillano), trying to scrape a living.
