This week’s best movie in theaters is the suspenseful German historical drama Barbara. In No, Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the regular guy who brainstormed the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is a pleasant comedy and a showcase for Jim Carrey. I admire Steven Soderbergh’s psychological thriller Side Effects, starring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Emperor, with Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas MacArthur leading the American occupation of Japan, is historical but plodding.
I haven’t yet seen Walter Salles’ Jack Kerouac movie On the Road, which opens today, or Sunday’s HBO movie Phil Spector. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD/Stream of the week is the most under-appreciated Big Movie of 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s inspired telling of the hunt for Bin Laden.
Turner Classic Movies is showing a couple of my guilty pleasures this week. The 1958 Terror in a Texas Town is a lousy movie with an wonderfully implausible climax where the good guy (Sterling Hayden with a Swedish accent) take on a gunfighter with a harpoon. An even worse movie, 1964’s The Outrage tried to remake Rashomon with a Mexican bandit – and landed Paul Newman the #8 spot on my list of Least Convincing Mexicans.