Holiday movie season is in full swing, with a mix of Christmas-themed films like Violent Night and awards contenders angling for attention.
The latter category includes Emancipation. Rock-smacking Will Smith stars as Peter, a slave on a Louisiana plantation who escapes to join the Union Army and put the hurt on some Confederates. Based on a true story from the Civil War era (except the real person was named Gordon), this is big-budget action adventure with a conscience.
The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons stars in Spoiler Alert, a romantic tear-jerker based on a memoir by journalist Michael Ausiello. He meets the love of his life, photographer Kit Cowan (Ben Aldridge), but their love is ultimately doomed. Directed by The Big Sick‘s Michael Showalter, this one looks to be a three-hanky deal.
The Colombian entry into the International Feature Academy Awards category, Memories of My Father is a story of Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and human rights activist who was murdered by a government paramilitary hit squad in the late 1960s. The film is told from the perspective of his son, Héctor Abad Faciolince, who wrote the book on which brothers Fernando (who also directs) and David Trueba based the screenplay.
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise has proven to be an enduring classic that nailed the paranoia and disorientation of the information age a decade before it really got going. Director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig as a couple of academics whose comfortable lives are upended by an “airborne toxic event.”
On Saturday night, the Time Warp Drive-In closes out its 2022 season at the Malco Summer Drive-In with Strange Christmas, featuring Robert Zemeckis’ uncanny valley cult classic from 2004, The Polar Express.
Keeping with the theme of questionable CGI, did you know the highest-grossing holiday film of all time is 2018’s The Grinch? Now you do.