COMING SOON

TWO MONTHS AND 23 OSCAR HOPEFULS. IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF YEAR FOR MOVIEGOERS.

If you think of the Oscars as a horse race, then trying to follow the awards in early December is like watching the pack through heavy fog, with one eye closed and your binoculars turned the wrong way around. Many of the most heavily hyped films have yet to open on Canadian screens.

You may have heard that La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, is going to reinvent the musical and sweep the Oscars (or at least the nominations) but unless you were lucky enough to see it at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s all just talk for now.

Studios like to save their most Oscar-hopeful movies for as late in the year as possible, the theory being that Academy voters have the attention spans of week-old kittens, and won’t remember a fantastic film if it played way back in October.

It should be noted, however, that the last best-picture winner to open in December was Million Dollar Baby back in 2004. Several others, including Crash and The Hurt Locker, have opened in the summer.

But the upside is that December becomes a veritable Christmas tree of movies — pick a branch and it’s likely to hold something shiny and bright. And January, still a dumping ground for Oscar-unhopefuls, finds late-released art-house fare rubbing shoulders with the likes of Underworld: Blood Wars, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, and something called Monster Trucks, which could just be the Sharknado/Transformers hybrid no one has been waiting for.

Here are just a few of the baubles coming our way in the next few weeks. Release dates are for Toronto; other cities sometimes follow a week or two later. And even now, dates are subject to change.