If the Oscar announcements have you craving a trip to the cinema, then we’ve got something for you.
They may not all be worth a small gold statuette, but there is something for everyone.
Need a good old-fashioned rom-com to blow away those January blues? J-Lo can arrange it with Shotgun Wedding.
Feeling like Bollywood? Shan Rukh Kahn returns in the action thriller Pathaan.
And for an Oscar contender, you can’t go wrong with All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a brilliant retelling of artist Nan Goldin’s battle with the Sackler family over their production of the opioid painkiller OxyContin.
One thing is certain. You no longer have a choice.
shotgun marriage
A sunny J-Lo comedy set in an island resort? Just the smile that ordered your January blues, this frothy nonsense casts the timeless Ms. Lopez as Darcy, an insecure bride whose groom and boyfriend (Josh Duhamel) are obsessed with creating the “perfect wedding” in a Philippine paradise . Trouble arises when the ceremony is ambushed first by Darcy’s ex (Lenny Kravitz) and then by pirates.
It evokes enough excitement of zip lines, hair extensions and beating high heeled thugs to keep you entertained.
Co-produced by Lopez, it also features the timeless icon’s smoking hot body. And why not? It’s left to White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge to articulate what we’re all thinking as she stares at those super-toned abs: “I just want to ask, is it genetics, or…?”
All the beauty and the bloodshed
Oscar-nominated and desired to win every other best documentary as well, in any other hand it would just be a portrait of photographer Nan Goldin. However, director Laura Poitras has constructed something much more terrifying.
It’s another David versus Goliath story by Poitras, whose earlier work includes Edward Snowden doc Citizenfour. The film is framed by Goldin’s struggle to hold wealthy art patrons, the Sackler family, accountable for their production of OxyContin, the opioid pain reliever to which Goldin was addicted.
But Poitra’s genius is the way she connects Goldin’s activism to her mentally ill sister, providing insight into the relationship between art, sexuality, power, pain and commerce and society’s silence of troubled women. All this and some very groovy recordings too.
Pathan
Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan takes the lead in this fourth installment in the Hindi spy action thriller series. Hold on to your hats – he’s an expatriate Raw agent brought in from the cold to stop a terrorist nuclear attack.
Only
If Shotgun Wedding didn’t give the Philippine Tourism Authority enough headaches, this American action thriller follows a commercial pilot, Gerard Butler, who struggles to save his passengers from bloodthirsty militias after he crashes on a remote Philippine island.
Undesirable
An Irish-British folk horror about an English village couple (Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth, both pictured) who move to a rural Irish idyll where they find murderous goblins in their back garden.
The Wandering Earth II
Celebrate the Chinese New Year with this prequel to one of the highest grossing foreign language films of all time. Andy Lau joins Wu Jing in a sci-fi thriller that threatens humanity as the sun threatens to engulf the earth. Yuck!
Source: Metro
