Welcome to Erik Henriksen Tells You What to Watch This Weekend™, a weekly post in which I, Erik Henriksen, tell you what you should watch this weekend! I will continue doing this post until you have watched everything you should watch.
I regret to inform you that we’re still in stupid January, which is a garbage month for garbage people, and a month that’s generally full of new movies that are garbage. Which hey, reminds me! Have you heard about M. Nighty Shyamalan’s Glass?
Glass is a pretty-but-emptily-ponderous mess, its sole accomplishment being a near-total waste of whatever goodwill Shyamalan had left after spending the better part of a decade as a punchline. As an act of pure regression, it is nearly flawless, with all his worst filmmaking instincts shamelessly indulged—especially his crippling, all-consuming addiction to “The Twist.”
So speaketh Mercury Calendar Editor Bobby Roberts, and I see no reason not to trust his keen judgment on this matter.
In brighter news, the Northwest Film Center’s annual Reel Music series starts up today, with the Mercury‘s Ned Lannamann, Ciara Dolan, and Robert Ham taking a look at the music-centric offerings. Read more about Reel Film here.
And then there’s Destroyer, the latest from Karyn Kasuma. As Lannamann writes,
Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, The Invitation) directs this bleak, bleary LA noir about a damaged cop (Nicole Kidman, under layers of de-prettifying makeup) tracking down the leader of a crime ring in which she spent months undercover. Told through fractured timelines, Destroyer occasionally clicks as a feminist interpolation of typically male-dominated anti-hero detective tropes, and there are some truly electric moments, including a bank-heist shootout and a cameo from Bradley Whitford as—what else?—a shitweasel lawyer. But Kusama makes this a character study foremost, at the expense of the supporting characters and the story’s more interesting genre elements.
As far as streaming goes, you’ve got not one but two documentaries about 2017’s disastrous Fyre Festival (more on those soon!), and in terms of repertory screenings, you have Mean Girls at the Academy Theater and some Miyazaki films at OMSI—Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Cat Returns, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and my favorite, Princess Mononoke. Hey! Maybe things aren’t so garbage-y after all!
(Things are still garbage-y.)
(But Princess Mononoke‘s great.)
Read more of the Mercury’s award-winning* movies and TV coverage! For movie times, click here.
*Not actually award-winning
