Thanksgiving weekend is the perfect time to take in a movie, especially when you’ve got options like Pixar’s newest The Good Dinosaur, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory in “smell-o-vision,” and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s The Night Before. Here are all of our critics’ picks for the weekend, and there are even more movie times on our Things To Do calendar.
NEW RELEASES
1. Creed
“If you loved the original Rocky—and its heart, and the sometimes unbearable tension it provided—Creed is a fun and worthy film-going experience. And an exception to the rule that lightning never strikes in the same place twice.” -Wm. Steven Humphrey
2. The Good Dinosaur
“A boy-and-his-dog story where the boy is a talking dinosaur and the dog is a little grunting caveman, The Good Dinosaur is one of Pixar’s best.” -Erik Henriksen
3. The Winding Stream
“The Winding Stream, which first screened at Northwest Film Forum’s 2015 Local Sightings film festival, takes us to the roots of a form of music that has long expressed the conditions and feelings of many working-class white Americans: country music. The director of The Winding Stream, Beth Harrington, will attend the screenings on November 27 and 28.” -Charles Mudede
Victor Frankenstein (featuring Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy) is also out this weekend, although Andrew Wright says it “comes off as sloppily paced, overly knowing, and mostly inadvertently hilarious.”
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
4. The Princess Bride Quote-a-Long
Think you know all the words? Now’s your chance to prove it—although there will be subtitles for “all the best lines.” Plus, free inflatable swords and ROUS.
5. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in Smell-O-Vision
There will be free “Wonkariffic goodie bags” to make this classic actually delicious.
6. The Breakfast Club
High-school kids spend a day in detention fighting, smoking dope, and dancing really funny.
7. Casablanca
They had a date with fate in Casablanca!
8. Roman Holiday
A sprightly young Audrey Hepburn and a charming (if slightly wooden), scooter-riding Gregory Peck make an odd pairing in this classic rom-com from 1953. Hepburn won a best actress Oscar for this performance, which was also her first starring role.
CONTINUING RUNS
9. Brooklyn
“It’s refreshing to see this largely internal, cerebral journey of an introverted young woman play out onscreen, and Nick Hornby’s screenplay, never afraid of sentimentality, keeps such a contained narrative from feeling too cold or distant. That’s right: Brooklyn is good because it’s so wholesome, so emotive, so free of irony, without qualifiers, and your grandma will probably like it a lot.” -Megan Burbank
10. Heart of a Dog
“If you’ve doubted Laurie Anderson’s Renaissance woman credentials, her great new autobiographical film Heart of a Dog will convince you otherwise. She directed, wrote, scored, coproduced, coshot, and did the voice-over for this elegiac tone poem about love, death, and dealing with loss.” -Dave Segal
11. The Martian
“I don’t know how high you’d have to be to not want to see a Ridley Scott film about Matt Damon getting stranded on Mars, based on Andy Weir’s startlingly sharp novel, and costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover, and Jeff Daniels, among others.” -Sean Nelson
12. The Night Before
“The Night Before might be the only Christmas movie that offers both a whole lot of dick pics and the sad, lonely sense of desperation that defines the holidays. But then Seth Rogen throws up all over a midnight mass, and all is right with the world.” -Erik Henriksen
13. Room
“Watch it as a sensitive and insightful character study, or watch it for “Daring Escape from Rape Shed!”—the action sequences are about as tense and nail-bitey as it gets. Either way, it works.” -Alison Hallett
14. Sicario
“In short, Denis Villeneuve’s new drug thriller is phenomenal. Its story is both personal and political, a scathing portrait of the drug war, as well as an elemental allegory in which moral dilemmas are depicted by characters crashing violently into each other.” -Ned Lannamann
15. Spectre
“Spectre has all the evidence that director Sam Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena.” -Sean Nelson
16. Spotlight
“It’s one thing for a reporter to break a story few people know about. It’s another thing entirely to tear the lid off a story everyone knows something about but whose true dimensions are too horrifying to imagine. Actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, which re-creates the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposure of the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, looks at a case of the latter with riveting results.” -Kathy Fennessy
17. Taxi
“Iranian director Jafar Panahi made two masterpieces in the previous decade, The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006). His first masterpiece of this decade is certainly Taxi, a film he shot, directed, edited, and starred in despite being under house arrest and banned by the state of Iran from making films.” -Charles Mudede
18. Trumbo
“Award season must be around the corner, because movies like Trumbo come out only when they can be considered. This kind of movie tends to be set in some yesteryear and plays jazz, smokes heavily, and wears a long silk dress as it approaches. Not to suggest that Roach doesn’t do a quality job here—as biopics go, this representation of Dalton Trumbo, a golden age screenwriter, is up there with the best.” -Jacob Lichty
