The new Star Wars trailer landed this Thanksgiving. Actually, it’s pretty underwhelming – all 88 seconds of it – but it was mercifully free of Jar Jar, Ewoks, CGI sets and George Lucas’s name, so there’s cause for new hope.
AND it did feature the one and only Millennium Falcon. After 31 years with no sign of the galaxy’s ‘fastest hunk of junk’ in cinemas, that’s a reason to give thanks.
From junk to funk – this week sees the release of Get On Up, a James Brown biopic that features a stellar lead performance from a relative newcomer to cinema, Chadwick Boseman. There’s also Project Almanac that follows a bunch of teens building a time machine …
For those of you cursed/blessed with children, you could do worse than Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day – a Disney live-action comedy featuring Steve Carrell as the patriarch of a family having the worst day (in the developed world sense).
Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry returns with Trash, a Brazil-set thriller centring on three young boys who make a fateful discovery in a rubbish dump. For something more earnest, there’s Tommy Lee Jones’s new western The Homesman, in which he does everything but sing the theme tune. The film has thus far drawn favourable comparisons with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
Finally, Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education) has served up a rare and bloody steak in The Riot Club, a damning fictionalisation of Oxford University’s secret dining society, the Bullingdon Club – which is reviewed above.
Where else but Cinemateket would you find Dennis Hopper alongside the Disney classics? And no season of Russian cinema would be complete without Andrei Tarkovsky’s autobiographical masterpiece The Mirror – see it on Sunday at 16.45.
Right before that, Cinemateket’s ‘Danish on a Sunday’ is a bi-monthly screening of Danish films with English subs.
This weekend presents Hella Joof’s gently subversive comedy Oh Happy Day, which sees a small-town woman, fast approaching middle age, rediscover herself entirely in the company of a black gospel priest. It starts at 14:15, and for an extra 40kr will get you coffee and a pastry. For a full Cinemateket program, visit dfi.dk/Filmhuset.
