On screen:
TV3’s movie expert Kate Rodger shares her pick of movies to make time for over the next couple of months, plus a new-season binge watch.
movies to look forward to over summer
The Greatest Showman
Opens December 26. Directed by Michael Gracey. Starring Hugh Jackman. Roll up roll up! Hugh Jackman (Logan/Les Misérables) as showman P. T. Barnum? Yes please! No question, this original musical circus romp looks set to be a massive crowdpleaser with Jackman’s Tony Award-winning song and dance skills showcased in the best possible way in a role he seems born to play. Michelle Williams and Zac Efron also star, as they help Jackman tell a story which celebrates the birth of show business and the man who helped in the delivery.
Call Me By Your Name
Opens December 26. Directed by Luca Guadagnino. Starring Armee Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. There are some films so enduring you’re destined to carry images and moments from them for a lifetime, like picture perfect postcards sent directly to your soul. Call Me By Your Name is one of those films. A love story set in Northern Italy in the early 1980s, every scene is drenched in light and music and told with a serene sensuality and a tantalising restraint. Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino’s previous outings, I am Love and more recently A
Bigger Splash, were both wonderful, but here he really gifts us all something very special. A reminder that love is love regardless of who loves who, we become immersed in the sexual awakening of 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) when his father’s research assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives to stay for the summer. Captivating, spellbinding and heartbreaking, I can’t wait to see this film again.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Opens January 1. Directed by Martin McDonagh. Starring Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson. Give Frances McDormand the Oscar already! She is unstoppable here as the angry, grieving foulmouthed mother Mildred Hayes on a very public mission to solve her daughter’s brutal murder. It seems nigh on deranged to describe such a story as a comedy but I promise you, if you love your
I can’t wait to see this film again.
darkness laced with very authentic, very human, laugh-out-loud humour, then filmmaker Martin McDonagh (In Bruge/Seven Psychopaths) is your man. This is without doubt his best film to date, with further standout performances from Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. Do NOT miss this when it hits cinemas from New Year’s Day.
Downsizing
Opens January 25. Directed by Alexander Payne. Starring Matt Damon and Cristoph Waltz. For some perfectly bonkers summertime weirdness, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne (The Descendants/ Sideways) decides to shrink Matt Damon in Downsizing, which looks to be one of the more accessibly entertaining satires of awards season. Based on the idea that the world is too big and so too our First World problems, our near future offers the once in a lifetime opportunity to move to Leisureland to live in a beautiful house with our beautiful wife. The only slight inconvenience is that we will be just a few inches tall. Yep, like I said, bonkers! Jason Sudeikis, Kristen Wiig and Christoph Waltz are along for this crazy ride, and I am ready to board the crazy-train with them.
I, Tonya
Opens February 6. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Starring Margot Robbie. The true story of disgraced American figure skater Tonya Harding is a tale clearly begging to be told for the big screen, and if the taste of the performances from Australian rising star Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street/Tarzan) and The West Wing alum Allison Janney in the film’s early trailers are anything to go by, then this film will be a cracker. Colouring in the headlines, Australian director Craig Gillespie tackles the events of this ice-skating scandal with an acerbic eye, stunning the critics during its debut at the Toronto Film Festival.
Stranger Things [SEASON 2. NETFLIX, 9 EPISODES]
Created by The Duffer Brothers. Starring Winona Ryder, Sean Astin and Millie Bobby Brown. Ever since the grand finale of the first season I have been counting the days to the next one. No more counting. We knew from those final few frames that the Upside Down was going to flip us over yet again, but the How, the Why and the Who has been keeping me awake nights ever since. The reveal here is just as slow, the difference being we know our players and their playing field, and we know it’s super creepy and not the way a normal small town in 1980s America should be. The relationships between these brilliant bike-riding besties are fleshed out, with some newbies welcomed into the fray to spice things up. Go in knowing nothing, come out feeling everything. Loved it.