By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
In Amarillo theaters this week: Your last chance to catch this year's Oscar nominees before the awards ceremony, plus a well-received horror flick from Jordan Peele (Key & Peele) and more.
Oscar Movie Week
All nine Best Picture nominees will continue to screen again through Sunday at Cinemark Hollywood 16, 9100 Canyon Drive, as part of the annual Oscar Movie Week celebration. Individual tickets are available at regular prices, or you can buy a pass for all nine films and the live-action and animated shorts marathons (Friday through Sunday) for $35. Here's the schedule (click the links for my reviews):
- La La Land: 7 p.m. Saturday
- Moonlight: 7 p.m. Friday
- Manchester by the Sea: 1 p.m. Saturday
- Hidden Figures: 4 p.m. Saturday
- Lion: 7 p.m. Thursday and 4 p.m. Sunday
- Arrival: 10 p.m. Friday
- Hacksaw Ridge: 4 p.m. Thursday and 10 p.m. Saturday
- Fences: 1 p.m. Sunday
- Hell or High Water: 4 p.m. Friday
- Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts (and a few honorable mentions) will air in several blocks at 2 and 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. Here's my review of the slate, which offers a broad sampling of world cinema and narrative styles.
- And as you're readying yourselves for Oscar Sunday, here are my thoughts on all of the nominees: Arrival to Hacksaw Ridge; Hail, Caesar! to Lion; The Lobster to The Salesman; and Silence to Zootopia.
Also screening
- Best Picture hopeful Lion continues for a seventh week at Premiere Cinemas Westgate Mall 6, 7701 W. Interstate 40.
- Box-office success Hidden Figures continues to screen at both the Amarillo Star 14 and Hollywood 16.
- Jackie, which netted Natalie Portman a nomination for best actress, continues screening at Westgate Mall 6.
- La La Land continues screening at the Hollywood 16 (five times daily in addition to the Oscar Movie Week screenings).
- Westgate Mall 6 has added Passengers (nominated for best original score and production design) and continues to screen Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (nominated for best costume design and production design) and Moana (nominated for best animated feature).
New in theaters
Collide
To help his girlfriend (Felicity Jones) get a kidney transplant in a German hospital, her boyfriend (Nicholas Hoult) agrees to work for one crime boss and finds himself pitted him against another (Anthony Hopkins), all leading to high-speed chases along the German autobahn. It's a power-packed cast for a film that, thanks to the bankruptcy of its former studio, has been delayed since August. It hasn't been screened for critics. (PG-13 for violence, frenetic action, some sexuality, language, and drug material; AS-14, H-16)
Get Out
Jordan Peele's follow-up to the smash success of Comedy Central sketch comedy show Key & Peele is, surprisingly, a horror flick, and as before, he's exploring race issues through the unexpected filter of genre filmmaking. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man, heads to the suburbs to meet his white girlfriend's (Allison Williams) parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) for the first time. There, he finds what could be either clueless white people or something more sinister. It's a horror film, so you can guess what that is. Critics are quite enamored. The Village Voice's Alan Scherstuhl calls it "the most trenchant studio release in years, a slow-building, often hilarious horror thriller built upon a dead-serious idea: that a black man walking alone through white suburbs is in as much danger as any slasher-flick teenager." Others compare it to the work of author Ira Levin: "In the same way that The Stepford Wives exploited liberated feminists’ fear of male chauvinists’ fear of liberated feminists, Get Out finds its tension in black people’s fear of white people’s fear of black people," writes The Wire's Alonso Duralde. (R for violence, bloody images, and language including sexual references; AS-14, H-16)
Rock Dog
The mastiffs living in the Tibetan mountains have one job in this new animated movie: To protect sheep from a wolf pack led by the evil Linnux (voiced by Lewis Black). Khampa (J.K. Simmons), their leader, has forbidden music to prevent distractions, but after his son Bodi (Luke Wilson) finds a radio dropped by a passing plane, he only wants to be a rock 'n' roll star. He eventually leaves the mountain and finds the reclusive rocker Angus Scattergood (Eddie Izzard) and tries to live out his musical dreams while also helping hold the wolves at bay. It, too, has not been screened for critics. (PG for action and language; AS-14, H-16)
Special engagements
Rusalka
The Met: Live in HD continues with this production of Antonin Dvorak's dark adaptation of The Little Mermaid with a water nymph (Kristine Opolais), the human prince (Brandon Jovanovich) with whom she falls in love, and the duplicitous withc Jezibaba (Jamie Barton) who helps her walk on land after paying a high price. The production, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by Sir Mark Elder, will screen at 11:55 a.m. Saturday at the Hollywood 16. (NR)
Still in theaters
A Cure for Wellness (AS-14, H-16); A Dog's Purpose (AS-14, H-16); Everybody Loves Somebody (H-16); Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (WM-6); Fifty Shades Darker (AS-14, H-16); Fist Fight (AS-14, H-16); The Great Wall (AS-14, H-16); Hidden Figures (AS-14, H-16); John Wick: Chapter 2 (AS-14, H-16); La La Land (H-16); The Lego Batman Movie (AS-14, H-16); Lion (WM-6); Moana (WM-6); Passengers (WM-6); Patriots Day (WM-6); Rings (AS-14); Split (AS-14, H-16); and Underworld: Blood Wars (WM-6). (Click links for my reviews)
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and on Facebook.
