The week of Christmas to New Year’s is the biggest box office film week of the year. More people go to the movies on Christmas Day through New Year’s Eve than attend films in the entire months of April and September.
In that one week last year, box office topped $500 million dollars, every seat was sold out, the line-ups were long, and chances are that if you didn’t purchase your ticket online in advance, you weren’t going to find a seat in the theatre for the movie you wanted to see. Count on the same in 2018.
The question remains, what to go and see at the theatre? Many people rely on Rotten Tomatoes, the film critic review aggregation site, although many others prefer MetaCritic, given that the site features only the most erudite, professional and trusted film critics on their better curated aggregation site.
Box office on the weekend before Christmas looked like this …
Okay, okay, enough of this folderol. Time to get on with why you’re here perusing VanRamblings today. Let’s start with …
Currently sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, the latest film from 2018 Best Picture Oscar award winner (Moonlight), Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk, here’s what The Telegraph’s lead film critic Tim Robey has to say: “If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.” 
Opens Christmas Day.
Although reviews for the new film from Adam McKay (The Big Short) are decidedly mixed, with a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, USA Today’s Brian Truitt writes about Vice, “Exquisitely crafted … It’s a strange little amalgamation that totally works: a vicious Shakespearean satire about power-hungry mind-sets, stealth corruption, American ambition and the current state of divided affairs in America, but also a quasi-fictional go-for-broke biopic about a political leader we really don’t know at all.”
Lots of Oscar buzz, though, most particularly for Christian Bale and Amy Adams, and even if it’s revisionist history — painting a far too rosy picture of the Bush administration — the film looks like fun. In the era of Trump, we need all the fun we can get. In this case, Vice may be just the ticket.
Here’s what the critics have to say about Bumblebee …
Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best Transformers movie released to date. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good Transformers movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.
What Bumblebee does best is remember that this is a franchise for the young, and embrace that fact without any shame while also still delivering on the action. There’s no self-importance, no grafting of ultra-patriotism and too-dense mythology onto what should be a simple narrative.
There’s a lot to like here, particularly Hailee Steinfeld’s performance.
Box office the weekend before Christmas doesn’t presage how a movie will do Christmas week: here’s betting that Bumblebee triumphs. Doesn’t really matter, though: Bumblebee’s foreign box office will easy double or triple the domestic, North American box office. Bumblebee seems recommendable.
With Shoplifters, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values & bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems, proving that Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Winner of the Palme d’or at Cannes this year, probable Best Foreign Language Oscar winner, currently playing at Cineplex International Village.
Note should be made that with Shoplifters, Kore-eda works in a beautiful register that feels both detailed and genuine at the same time, allowing us to get to know these characters so deeply that it is heart-wrenching, the film wise and insightful always, delicate, modest, skillful, compassionate, piercingly intelligent, poignant, memorable, and unexpectedly powerful.
Now, I’ve already written about the Best of 2018 at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre, the comfiest, friendliest and most welcoming cinema in Vancouver, this superlative year-end series programmed by the peerless Tom Charity. The 10 films in the series start their run on Wednesday, December 27th, and concludes eight glorious days later on Thursday, January 3rd. Not to be missed. See ya at the Vancity.
For more info on VIFF’s Best of 2018 series just click on the links.
And, oh yeah — don’t forget: Alfonso Cuarón’s probable Best Picture Oscar winner, Roma, continues to play to sold-out houses each day, exclusively at the Vancity Theatre. Gorgeous and moving, and also not to be missed.
And, finally, there’s this, an amalgam of films screening around Vancouver, or set to come to the Vancity, or opening near you, during the course of the next month, including a few Best Foreign Language Oscar nominees.
