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Movies & TV

Weekend movies: The Nice Guys, The Angry Birds Movie, High-Rise and more

>>> The Nice Guys finds writer/director Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3) back doing the thing he does better than anyone else: making deliriously entertaining action-comedies about mismatched partners battling an escalating threat. The Nice Guys casts Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as Jackson Healy and Holland March, low-level investigators in 1977 Los Angeles who unpack a simple missing-person case to discover a massive and deadly conspiracy. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNNN


Dark Horse is a crowd-pleasing documentary recounting the tale of Dream Alliance, a racehorse whose triumph at the 2009 Welsh National became a media-friendly Cinderella story. (Owned by a syndicate of friends in the small South Wales town of Blackwood, Dream Alliance won the race after recovering from a potentially career-ending injury.) (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNN


The Angry Birds Movie delivers the simple, destructive pleasures we’d expect from the brand extension of the popular video game app, but only at the end. The movie has a much bigger screen to fill than the one on your cellphone, and it has to go through familiar, harmless and occasionally amusing plot motions to explain why the birds are so angry, and why they’re perfectly justified in going bin Laden on buildings. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NN


>>> League Of Exotique Dancers tracks those brazen women who lit up burlesque stages all over the U.S. more than 50 years ago and now prepare to enter the Legends of Burlesque Hall of Fame in Vegas. These unique individuals – all proud, creative and fiercely independent – worked at a time when all-out nudity was illegal and stripping was powered by the pasty. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNNN


>>> Men & Chicken casts David Dencik and Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen as deeply eccentric Danish brothers who set off for the island of Ork to trace their parentage and discover they have three brothers living in a decrepit sanitarium while their elderly father putters around upstairs. And it only gets weirder. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNNN


Holy Hell tracks the filmmaker’s experiences in the 80s and 90s, when he fell under the sway of West Hollywood’s Buddhafield cult. The charismatic guru who called himself Michel sold his followers cosmic awareness through a philosophy of laughter, joy and fitness… so long as they didn’t have sex with each other, because that was icky. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NN


Belladonna Of Sadness is a rediscovered 1973 animated feature that now looks like the apex of the psychedelic sexploitation era: an expressionist pop art freak-out set in medieval France. A stunning young bride, Jeanne (voiced by Aiko Nagayama), is thrown into a surrealistic landscape of torture and desire through the machinations of a feudal lord and a penis creature. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNN


High-Rise is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s apocalyptic 1975 novel about the residents of a bold new tower block who devolve into anarchy when the building starts to malfunction. Director Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump devise a visual analogue to Ballard’s acidic satire: their film isn’t just set in the 70s but designed to emulate its cinema precisely, with sickly lighting, creeping zooms, Kubrickian focal choices and a very effective use of an ABBA song on the soundtrack. (See full review). 

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NNN


The Man Who Knew Infinity stars Dev Patel as Srinivasa Ramanujan, the famed Tamil Indian mathematician who redefined algebra before dying young in 1920. Looking doe-eyed and browbeaten, Patel doesn’t have a lot to work with in terms of cracking Ramanujan’s character. (See full review).

Opens May 20. See listing. 

Rating: NN


Available now on Netflix


>>> Two Days, One Night stars the magnificent Marion Cotillard at the fore. Her Sandra is struggling with depression and has just received word that co-workers voted to eliminate her factory job in order to save their bonus. While her initial reaction is to drown her sorrows in pills, her husband and friends insist that she convince her colleagues to have a change of heart. (See full review). 

Rating: NNNNN

Available to watch here.

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