Most good sequels try to outdo the originals, and the Now You See Me franchise is no different. At least, now that they have a second film in the making, so they become a franchise rather than a single offering. I really like the first film in this series, and can’t wait to see how the new one does!
Nola and the Clones sounds interesting but seems to only exist on IMDB as a minimalist entry. Sadly Krampus, a movie about a boy who unleashes a Christmas Demon, seems to be a real film. The movie that does look interesting this week isn’t Sci-Fi or Fantasy at all; A Royal Night Out is about teenage Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret escaping the palace on VE day 1945 to celebrate in the streets of London along with the rest of the city. That part really happened, but I am pretty sure the events depicted in the film are fiction beyond that. Still, it looks like a fun film, I just might take it in this weekend.
Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay for Anomalisa, an animated film that has won a number of important awards on the film festival circuit and received an assortment of critical praise. If you don’t recognize the name, he also wrote the screenplays of a couple of other movies I really liked, Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It will be in a limited number of theaters December 30th, and pretty much everywhere come January. Which tells me Charlie is going to see if he can’t pull off a small collection of Academy Awards for his latest masterpiece.
On Wednesday we get Victor Frankenstein as told from Igor’s perspective, and The Good Dinosaur, an animated Disney/Pixar presentation. Both films are obviously taking advantage of the holiday weekend to pack in a couple of extra days worth of box office receipts to bolster their opening weekend take, but there are a few good things coming out on Friday as well. Tamasha is a Bollywood/French fantasy tale about two people wandering about an island trying to fit themselves into a society they do not belong to, while Janis: Little Girl Blue is a documentary about Janis Joplin’s rise to stardom traced through her correspondence with her family, friends, and collaborators.
One of the most amazing animation franchises of all time, Kung Fu Panda became a classic the first day the first movie came out, and went right over the top after that. We have a bit of a wait, since it won’t be hitting the big screen until January 29th of 2016, but I am quite ready for it! If it is anything like the previous installments in the franchise, it should also have quite the range of animations styles, a different one for each segment of the story they will be telling.
Because Finding Nemo just wasn’t cute enough, now Disney is rolling out Finding Dory, another tale of lost fish and their adventures trying to find their way (or at least remember) home. It does look like world class animation, and the usual excellent story telling. It will be available in theaters 17Jun2016.