I hope you’ve all iced your crotch punches from last weekend and are ready to get down to brass tax. Joseph Gordon-Levitt with cancer! Come on now, people, we’ve got to be SERIOUS, it’s almost October after all. We need politics and drama and commentary, like in the scathing feminist critique of “What’s Your Number?” (Lemme guess, Chris Evans is number 20 and she doesn’t have to go over the socially acceptable limit of dudes effed). So put on the big boy or girl pants, this weekend we’ve got “50/50,” “Dream House,” “What’s Your Number?” and “Take Shelter” hitting screens.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the stand in for writer Will Reiser during his battle with cancer, with Seth Rogen as his best friend, in “50/50” directed by Jonathan Levine. Bryce Dallas Howard plays his girlfriend, Anjelica Huston his mom and Anna Kendrick his therapist. Our review says, “With a cast filled with such talented players, entertaining moments are sprinkled throughout and you get the feeling that, with a push or a prod in one direction or another and a clearer aim, it might just have hit its mark more often than it does.” Rotten Tomatoes: 91% Metacritic: 72
So Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz move into a scary house and Naomi Watts is all “bad stuff happened here and the scary guy who did it is coming back!” and Daniel Craig is the guy who did it? So Daniel Craig and evil Daniel Craig fight. I think? They aren’t screening for critics so my interpretation of the trailer is all we have to work with here. Tread carefully in going to see this evil Daniel Craig twins thriller. I hope I hope I hope it’s twins! RT: 0%
Funny lady Anna Faris revisits her ex boyfriends in “What’s Your Number?” in order to marry one of them and not be a HUGE SLUT who has slept with more than 20 people. A winning cast of ex-bfs is lined up, but of course she’s also got bro-haircut Chris Evans lothario across the hall. Our review says audiences will enjoy the film if “you’re mentally deficient and/or consider looking at Chris Evans’s V-shaped lower abs for 100 minutes a good use of mental energy (note that these aren’t mutually exclusive)” and that it ends up being “awkward and not that funny.” RT: 24% MC: 34
Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are Tucker and Dale in “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil,” two well meaning hillbillies who get involved with a group of paranoid and accident prone teens who think they are evil incarnate. With “30 Rock” cheesecake Katrina Bowden. While our review says the high concept gets stretched a bit thin over a feature running time, director Eli Craig and co-writer Morgan Jurgenson “tip their hat to the genre and armed with a novelty concept and a sweet, disarming sense of humor, deliver a funny movie with heart.” RT: 87% MC: 63
Michael Shannon portrays a man who becomes obsessed with the possibility of a coming apocalypse, and Jessica Chastain is his concerned wife in Jeff Nichols‘ “Take Shelter.” Our review from Sundance says the film is, “a slow-building silent scream that culminates in a moment designed to terrify and transfix just as expertly as it was calculated to send audiences into the lobby arguing about what it truly means.” RT: 95% MC: 84
Kenneth Longergan‘s notoriously delayed “Margaret” finally hits theaters this week, and the controversy is not stopping there, as the pic has proven itself to be wildly divisive. The film features Anna Paquin as a teenager coping with her role in the death of a woman in a bus accident in post 9/11 New York. With Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin and Allison Janney. We ran a point-counterpoint review earlier this week, with one Playlist staffer saying it was “worth the wait” for the “picaresque, beautifully rendered and affecting drama,” while our EIC declared, “Ultimately frustrating with a grating, off-putting and intolerable lead character that will lead some audiences to loathe her and move others to empathize with her, “Margaret” is a picture some will admire, few will love and some will detest, but that no one will be able to stop talking about.” RT: 50% MC: 55
Inflammatory British documentarian Nick Broomfield (of “Kurt and Courtney“) focuses his latest hit on Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin in “Sarah Palin You Betcha!” Unfortunately, according to our review, the film ends up being “boring, toothless, and genial,” and “unfocused, shallow, and dull; strange considering Palin is easily Broomfield’s splashiest target thus far.” RT: 30% MC: 37
Also in theaters: a truck driver caught up in the bleak Russian underworld in “My Joy,” from director Sergei Loznitsa RT: 91%; Bollywood flick “Breakaway” about an Indian hockey team in Canada with Rob Lowe and Camilla Belle (yes you heard that right); doc “Brenda Bilili!” follows a group of disabled and able-bodied street musicians in Congo RT: 89%; Matt Damon narrates the Dave Eggers co-produced doc “American Teacher” RT: 58%; documentary “Finding Joe” about famed Mythologist Joseph Campbell RT: 40%