Shin Gojira AKA Godzilla Resurgence has a limited run from October 11th to the 18th across the country, with most places having a theater within an hours drive. I mention it today because at least one theater is getting it on Friday the 7th, apparently. The other reason to mention it now is I didn’t find any other interesting movies for this weekend.
The CG Society selected 2015’s Allegro’s Legendy Polskie Film SMOK (The Dragon) as one of the 10 best CGI films of the year. I have to agree that this is an amazing little film, and while it uses the visual medium to tell the majority of its story I was grateful for the limited number of English subtitles it needed to get the dialog across.
This week the 2014 remake of the French film classic La Belle et la Bête, AKA Beauty and the Beast will be available in American theaters. It has English subtitles for those who don’t speak the language although if you know the story you probably won’t need them. Also this week The Girl with All the Gifts is being released in the UK and at Fantastic Fest, going to wide release on October 11th.
Zashchitniki, or Guardians in English, is a new Russian superhero movie coming to the big screen next year. Thanks to SFX for the heads up on this one.
Tesla Noir, French Animated Steampunk, and turning people into animals against their will; this is an interesting week for disc releases. April and the Extraordinary World is French animated Steampunk at its finest, and I can’t wait to see it. The Lobster is already coming out on disc, even though it is still in its limited run of theaters. If you don’t partner up and couple down by a certain age, you are transmogrified into an animal and turned loose in the wild to fend for yourself. The American Side has the protagonist drawn into a race to find a secret device designed by Tesla with unknown powers and potential, hidden somewhere near the power plant that Tesla also designed, but which was built by his adversary Edison at Niagara Falls. There is also another DC animated release, Batman: The Killing Joke, which might have been better if they hadn’t brought it to the screen.
In Anime, Gundam Build Fighters: Complete Collection looks like a good choice, as does The Rolling Girls: The Complete Series, kind of a superhero road trip. Plus World Break: Aria of Curse for a Holy Swordsman is the complete series in one box, about reincarnated warriors going to school together, and Jormungand looks at illegal arms dealers out to save the world. For once I haven’t seen a single one of these, so I am going to flip a coin and start streaming the winner.
We have 5 movies to choose from this time around, 2 of which will be playing everywhere, the last 3 will be more limited. Nerve is not only first out of the gate with a release on Wednesday the 27th, but it also has a Pokemon Go tie in, I guess because the edge-of-your-seat story line just wasn’t enough. Jason Bourne is the other out-everywhere title, and like most spy books/movies it includes science fiction elements in its plot, premise, or gadgets, if you were wondering why I count them as genre.
In more limited release we get Monkey King: Hero Is Back, an animated fantasy starring Jackie Chan as the Monkey King. The last Monkey King movie Jackie Chan was in was the live action Forbidden Kingdom, and Jet Li got to play the famous demigod in that one. Both movies include the Monkey King’s release after 500 years from his prison of ice, a rather pivotal moment in his legend. League of Gods is based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Feng Shen Yan Yi, in which King Zhou becomes evil after a spirit disguised as one of his concubines twists his mind around. And finally the description of Dishoom sounds like a fantasy adventure premise to me: John and Varun go on a suicidal mission to rescue Jaqcueline, the princess, from her evil fiancé. Everybody’s already seen the trailers for the first two movies, here are the ones for the other three.
Monkey King: Hero Is Back – Official Trailer from Viva Pictures Distribution, LLC on Vimeo.