Here's the low-down on which of this week's new releases are worth the ticket price.
Sully *****
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney, Anna Gunn
Sully is a beautifully captured tale of bravery, human spirit and is a poignant reflection on how one man can restore some of your faith in humanity. It's exactly the kind of movie America needs right now.
In the safe hands of director Clint Eastwood, the true-life drama of Capt. Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger's emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009 manages to capture the vigour and resonance of an ordinary man plunged into extraordinary circumstances.
There were 208 seconds between the fateful moment US Airways Flight 1549 sucked geese into its engines at 2,818 ft above LaGuardia Airport to the moment when Sully (played by Tom Hanks) skillfully glided the craft down onto the Hudson on a bitter January afternoon.
Read Laura Delaney's full review here.
Allied ***
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Lizzy Caplan, Marion Bailey, Camille Cottin, Simon McBurney
Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard are two World War II spies who fall in love during a daring mission in Casablanca but all it not fair in love and war
The main tabloid talking point around Robert Zemeckis’ handsome new WWII spy romance was that our two very starry leads, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, were involved in a passionate on-set affair.
In the weeks before Allied’s release, Angelina Jolie had voted for BrexPitt and the parallels with the erstwhile couple's earlier (and awful) spy romance Mr and Mrs Smith and Allied proved all too irresistible for click bait fixated hacks.
Read Alan Corr's full review here.
Bad Santa **
Director: Mark Waters
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Tony Cox, Christina Hendricks, Brett Kelly
Ho Ho No. Bad Santa 2 is an unnecessary follow-up to the 2003 cult classic.
Bad Santa worked because of its irreverent, unique take on the holidays - and Billy Bob Thornton is just impossible to dislike - but Bad Santa 2 manages to lose everything that made the original special, becoming another classic case of sequel regret.
Coming back together for one last heist, Willie (Thornton) and Marcus (Cox) have their sights set on stealing millions from a charity organisation, and to mix things up the plot is being orchestrated by Willie's mother Sunny (Bates).
Read Sinead Brennan's full review here.
Chi-Raq **1/2
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: John Cusack, Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L Jackson
A young black girl is accidentally killed in Southside Chicago neighbourhood in a shootout between rival gangs the Trojans and Spartans. Such is the outrage felt by the persuasively sexy and formidable Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) that, led by her, the local women collectively vote to withhold sexual favours from their men, until the gangs lay down their guns. Moreover, Lysistrata is herself the girlfriend to Spartan gang-leaders Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) which name, incidentally, is also the hard-bitten euphemism for Chicago in the movie. Meanwhile, Wesley Snipes plays Cyclops, leader of the Trojans.
Such is the basic synopsis of Spike Lee’s fairly ho-hum rap 'n gospel musical, which is based on Aristophanes’s Greek comedy, Lysistrata. While it may owe something to Greek theatre and to a kind of ersatz rap, it owes just as much, you could argue, to the cloying earnestness of Jesus Christ Superstar. Yet it is a relevant film, given the fact that the area of Chicago depicted in the movie has seen more Americans killed in the past fifteen years than the Afghan and Iraq wars combined.
Read Paddy Kehoe's full review here.
Paterson ****1/2
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Helen-Jean Arthur
One of the many great gifts that Lena Dunham's magnificent Girls gave us was Adam Driver. Okay, his acting career had both started and begun to take off previous to the zeitgeisty HBO dramedy, but his breakthrough was achieved playing the emotionally unstable Adam Sackler.
Since then he's gone as far up the food chain as you can go in the Tinseltown scheme of things by starring as the villain Kylo Ren in last year's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a role which he's set to reprise in future Star Wars films and where his character will become at least as despised as Darth Vader. Not bad for an ex-Marine with issues.
Here, Driver shows he's both unshaken by global stardom and a remarkably magnetic and subtle performer in a film as far removed from Hollywood blockbuster franchises as is cinematically possible. This is a classic slice of indie film.
Read John Byrne's full review here.
