After a somewhat quiet last weekend, Hollywood is ramping up for summer it appears as there are five new releases this week coming at audiences. The leader of the pack has to be the Steve Carell and Jim Carrey-starring Las Vegas magician comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Will it knock off last week's box office champ Oz: The Great and Powerful? We're not so sure, but read on to see what you have in store for this third weekend in March.
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: Carell and Carey may be the leads in this comedy, but it also contains one heck of a supporting cast with Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin, Steve Buscemi and James Gandolfini. Carell is the title character and he has had a blockbuster magic show at Bally's with his partner Anton (Buscemi) for years.
Trouble arrives in the form of Carrey's street magician who has people more excited about magic than Burt has audience members of late. As we state in our The Incredible Burt Wonderstone review, you will laugh a lot. It's not one of the best comedies of all-time, but certainly well worth your time to witness Carrey and Carell go at it.
The Call: Halle Berry is surprisingly riveting in this thriller about a 911 operator who gets sucked into a kidnapping. Berry, it is established early on, lost a teenage girl to a killer that was on the phone with her. Months later, the action picks up and it is happening again. But this time, she is determined that it will conclude differently.
The film has not been teased for audiences very well and that is unfortunate, because as we say in our The Call review, this is a solid thriller with a few predictable turns, but still fun nonetheless.
Spring Breakers: Wow, where to start with this James Franco-starring cinematic explosion? First of all, if you're of the faint of heart and are easily offended, this is not the movie for you. A group of four college girls (Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Selena Gomez and Rachel Korine) hit spring break and go on a crime spree that only intensifies when they meet Franco's drug lord/wanna-be rapper.
Writer-director Harmony Korine (yes, Rachel's husband) has crafted another thought-provoker after his 1995 work on Kids. We state in our Spring Breakers review that Movie Fanatic thinks the film is genius, but as we said, it is not for everyone.
Upside Down: Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess star as two souls who fall in love. Simple, right? Not so fast... they live on planets who share an atmosphere, but possess opposite gravitational pull. That creates a challenge for their love to flourish. The film is wildly original, looks mesmerizing and is one to be celebrated for its groundbreaking vision. Yet, as we say in our Upside Down review, it falls apart in the third act when it frustratingly breaks all its own rules.
