With the announcement of the Academy Award nominations, we enter the most prestigious time of year for the movie industry.
Best picture nominees like The Artist, The Descendants and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are still playing in the area, and many other films nominated in other categories are also showing or coming soon.
Big Miracle is a romantic drama set during the true story of the rescue of three whales in Point Barrow, Alaska in 1988.
Drew Barrymore stars as a Greenpeace volunteer who joins forces with a local newsman (John Krasinski) and rival world superpowers to save a family of grey whales trapped by rapidly forming ice in the Arctic Circle.
The newsman is hoping that the story of the whales’ plight might launch him out of the remote assignment, but the world comes chasing it too. Hungry journalists, heads of state and an oil tycoon descend upon the frigid outpost and with time running out, they must rally the unlikely coalition of Inuit natives, oil companies and Russian and American military to set aside their differences and free the whales.
Ken Kwapis, who previously directed Barrymore in He’s Just Not That into You, is behind the camera and Kristen Bell, Ted Danson and Dermont Mulroney also star.
The Woman in Black is the first film Daniel Radcliffe has starred in since the final Harry Potter.
What will be interesting to see is if he can turn the fame that he has gained from being the boy wizard can be turned into a successful long-term acting career.
He did make his big screen debut with Pierce Brosnan in The Tailor of Panama and appeared on stage and British television between Harry Potter films, but this is the first film that he is the long marquee name.
The Woman in Black is a horror-thriller in which he plays a young London lawyer who travels to a small village to settle the affairs of a recently deceased woman. He soon discovers that everyone in the town is keeping a terrible secret and soon learns that his client’s house is haunted by the ghost of a woman who terrorizes everyone who gets in her way.
Chronicle is a relatively low-budget but impressive looking sci-fi film about three high school friends who gain the superhuman abilities of telekinesis, flight and invulnerability after making an incredible discovery in a mysterious crater.
They start using their new abilities for mischief and personal gain but their lives start spinning out of control when one of the three starts using them for darker purposes.
The cast is relatively unknown, but co-creator and screenwriter Max Landis is the son of John Landis, best known for directing Animal House, The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London.
–– Rick Davis is a theatre manager living in Kelowna. His column normally appears in the Kelowna Capital News.
