Not with a roar, but a whimper

This is it, folks. Unless you know something I don’t, there will be no new releases next Friday, December 30. (Scott and I will take the occasion to post our two Top Ten Lists, which feature just one overlap!) Instead, they’re throwing a bunch of them at you this week and seeing what sticks. My take: not much.

Assassin’s Creed? To me, it just confirms all the bad things I thought about Justin Kurzel’s work after he made the narcoleptic Macbeth. Macbeth! With Fassbender and Cotillard! And here they are again, just as disappointing but this time relying on a video game as story source instead of Shakespeare. Urgh.

Passengers? Between Serena, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One and Part Two, Joy, X-Men: Apocalypse and this, I’m beginning to think maybe Jennifer Lawrence needs to make some kind of change. She was so good in Winter’s Bone, so much fun in American Hustle, and even moving in the first Hunger Games. But lately? Hrm.

Fences? It’s hard to know which is more bravura, August Wilson’s dialogue or Denzel Washington’s performance of same, but it’s still an awful stagey movie. And for all the talk about the house, I feel like it should have played more of a role, the way the castle did in Citizen Kane. Instead, it was very much a space inside of which folks moved around. Still, it was the best of my bunch.

The best of Scott’s bunch was the quest-for-birth-parents story Lion (hence the tweak of T. S. Eliot in the title of this post), which gets extra points for overcoming expectations. (Scott loves it when films do that, viz. Remember, et al. The worst was Notes on Blindness, which earned a walk-out — only his second this year but the first that involved leaving his living room. The bad boyfriend romp Why Him? will presumably fall somewhere in between; he’s at the screening now.

What’s that? Why didn’t we review the animated singing competition movie Sing? Because you don’t need a review to know if you want to see that one.

Cheers, all. Here’s to 2017.