Movie Roundup (Tweet-of-Consciousness)

THIS WEEK’S LINEUP
A United Kingdom (Amma Asante)
Alone in Berlin (Vincent Perez)
American Honey (Andrea Arnold)
Fences (Denzel Washington) / It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan)
The Founder (John Lee Hancock)
John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)
Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (Hark Tsui)
Kedi (Ceyda Torun)
Keep Quiet (Sam Blair / Joseph Martin)
La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska)
Moana (too many to list, so I’ll just go with: Disney)
Mr. Gaga (Tomey Heymann)
My Life As A Zucchini (Claude Barras)
Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Olivier Ducastel / Jacques Martineau)
The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit)
The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi)
Split (M. Night Shyamalan)

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THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: The Most Unappreciated Annual Movie Event

The Academy Awards are a hot topic right now leading up to Sunday, but very few talk about…THE SHORTS!!! Most people don’t know that the nominated Live Action (good), Animated (better), and Documentary (best) short films are currently playing in movie theaters near many of you (if not, they’re also online and on demand, but everyone who CAN see these in theaters should do so; they deserve the big screen treatment). Since it’s really the most unappreciated and flat out best annual movie event (FAAAAR more enjoyable than the actual Oscars ceremony), I decided to write a bit about this year’s entries:

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A Weekend in the Cinema: A CURE FOR WELLNESS; THE GREAT WALL; FIST FIGHT

For much of my life, I’ve made a concerted effort to see wide release movies together in their opening weekends. Though rival studios only really focus on one element when choosing release dates – $$$$$ – unintentional connections can still be forced made between the flicks because most contemporaneous art tends to comment on shared factors intrinsic to the time and environment in which they’re produced. As such, I shall attempt to explore these ideas – BRIEFLY, I swear – every Monday through the lens of the weekend’s slate after having the opportunity to see them all (within reason). Though they’re almost always far superior offerings, because of their ever-changing release dates from city to city, independent films will be excluded from this series, which I’m dubbing “Weekends in the Cinema” (SONDHEIM!!!). Without further ado…

The three movies released wide this past weekend – A Cure for Wellness, The Great Wall, and Fist Fight – are all throwbacks in their own way:

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