This week’s trio of new movie releases feature an intense thriller, a gritty reboot, and… spiders? More on those below.
Accompanying the new films, you can also catch Gremlins as this week’s Throwback Cinema option and Spirited Away as part of the ongoing Anime Festival. For recorded stage productions, check out National Theatre Live’s Dear England as well.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Johannesburg leg of The 48 Hour Film Project is screening this weekend, exclusively at Mall of Africa. Book for those here.
Blink Twice is not only a sharp and cutting psychological thriller that doesn’t pull any punches, it’s also Channing Tatum’s best – and most intense – role to date. He plays tech billionaire Slater King, who invites cocktail waitress Frida (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody’s Naomi Ackie) to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. Wild nights blend into sun-soaked days and everyone’s having a great time. No one wants this trip to end, but as strange things start to happen, Frida begins to question her reality. She’ll have to uncover the truth if she wants to make it out alive.
Read our full review for Blink Twice here.
Finally out of development hell and flapping around in cinemas is super-powered revenge actioner The Crow. In this “edgy” remake of the original cult classic from 1994, Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Draven returns to seek bloody revenge against the killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
You can find our full review of The Crow here.
If you wanted introduce your children to murder mysteries in the vein of Hercule Poirot or Knives Out, but also give your kids nightmares by having the characters as anthropomorphic spiders and insects, I imagine you end up with something like animated adventure Inspector Sun. When a spider detective boards a seaplane to San Francisco after finally capturing his arch nemesis, a murder on his flight draws him into a plot that threatens both the human and bug worlds.