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Weekend Movie Forecast: New in Town or Medicine for Melancholy?

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Rom-com New in Town stars Oscar-winner RenÃ©e Zellweger as Lucy, a corporate exec sent from headquarters in Miami to a small town in Minnesota to downsize a food-processing plant. Once there, her mission is compromised as her disdain for the plant's union rep (Harry Connick Jr.) segues inexorably into ardor. In a review titled, "What the Hellweger?", <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/01302009/entertainment/movies/what_the_hellweger__152656.htm">the Post's Lou Lumenick writes</a>, "With the recession getting worse by the day, it's asking an awful lot for audiences to laugh at a romantic comedy centering on corporate layoffs. How awful is New in Town? Let me list its comic high points for you: 1. Lucy struggling with the zipper of a pair of hunting overalls so she can pee in the woods. 2. Lucy accidentally shooting the plant manager (J.K. Simmons) she fired in the buttocks. 3. A tapioca fight in the plant."

Gothamist

Best known for his appearances as a fake-news correspondent on The Daily Show, Wyatt Cenac is making his feature debut in Medicine for Melancholy, "a love story of bikes and one-night stands told through two African-American twenty-somethings dealing with issues of class, identity, and the evolving conundrum of being a minority in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco." <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/film/medicine-for-melancholy-both-political-and-graceful/">The Village Voice's Ernest Hardy</a> writes, "The script's politics sound didactic in the listing, and they're moving in the execution. [Director Barry] Jenkins's dialogue is crisp and witty, sounding and flowing the way real people speak. But it's also shrewdly nuanced... Jenkins has joked in interviews that the film is black mumblecore, and it is, but with an intensity of purpose often lacking in that movement." For more on that, here's <a href="http://daily.greencine.com/archives/007316.html">a GreenCine interview</a> with Wyatt Cenac.

Gothamist

The Uninvited, a remake of a Korean horror flick starring David Strathairn, may be a piece of shit, but at least we get <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/movies/30unin.html">a scathing A.O. Scott pan</a> out of it: "The Uninvited sounds like the name of a generic horror movie, which is more or less what it is. But when you stop to think about it, the title is actually a clue to the pictureâs lameness. Words beginning with "un" do have a certain scary resonance â intimations of the unknown, the undead, the uncontrollable and the unholy â but "uninvited"? As in "not on the guest list"? Only in Hollywood could such a notion be a source of terror. By the time the credits rolled I wished that the title had referred to me."

Gothamist

Action/suspense flick Taken stars Liam Neeson as a retired undercover agent on the run from the bad guys while searching for his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace). Here's <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/01302009/entertainment/movies/not_taken_with_this_152663.htm">the Post's Kyle Smith</a>: "Next out of the January dreg-u-lator: A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it Paycheck. Taken, one of those Frenchy efforts to do an American-style chase-'em-down and shoot-'em-up, comes from formerly respectable producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel, whose homegrown, low-budget action thriller District B13 was a lively little collection of stunts. In trying to broaden their scale to interest a big American audience, Besson and Morel are as convincing as Marcel Marceau doing John Wayne."

Gothamist

Narrated by Joan Allen, Blessed Is the Match is the first documentary about Hannah Senesh, the World War II-era poet and diarist who became a paratrooper, resistance fighter and modern-day Joan of Arc in her attempt to save Jews from the holocaust, who [spoiler alert!] was ultimately captured, tortured and killed her. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/movies/28bles.html?ref=movies">Jeannette Catsoulis at the Times</a> is disappointed: "Dousing any excitement that threatens to disrupt the movieâs reverent tone, Joan Allen droningly narrates from the writings of Ms. Seneshâs mother, Catherine (who appears briefly in a clip from a 1981 interview). But as Todd Boekelheideâs lugubrious score groans in the background and animated arrows forge across maps, Ms. Seneshâs former cellmates and fellow kibbutz members hint intriguingly at an aloof, lonely young woman whose poem 'Blessed Is the Match' suggests a hyper-idealized view of her destiny."'I didnât like her; I admired her,' a fellow parachutist says dryly. But the director ignores this and every opportunity to excavate the heroine from the heroism, opting instead for a tribute that leaves Ms. Senesh âs personality as vague in the final frame as in the first."

Gothamist

Serbis is a multi-character, day-in-the-life portrait of a family-run movie house in the Philippines that shows graphic double features while enabling sexual encounters in the seats. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/film/dirty-movies-and-gritty-life-as-one-in-brillante-mendoza-s-raunchy-thinky-serbis/">J. Hoberman at the Village Voice</a> approves: "More outrageous than prurient, Serbis has no shortage of appalling detailsâits ideal spectator might be John Watersâbut there's probably something for everyone... For all its gross-outs, Serbis is an essentially modernist enterprise in which figure and ground, character-driven narrative and celluloid spectacle, are in continual flux. In another universe, perhaps Comedy Central, it could be a porn-based sitcom. But is that porn or meta porn? Serbis may be a raunch-fest, but it's also a mind-tripâa raunch-fest with ideas."

Gothamist

Gay melodrama Between Love & Goodbye, set in New York City, charts the long breakup between Marcel, a French citizen, and a singer named Kyle. <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/movies/30betw.html?ref=movies">The Times's Nathan Lee</a> writes, "Between Love & Goodbye tells of the ill-fated romance between a pair of East Village transplants with 2 percent body fat, zero personality and even less chemistry. Never credible as a love story, Between Love & Goodbye is viciously, almost hysterically committed to the fracturing and collapse of Marcel and Kyleâs love affair. Acrimonious in the extreme, the second half of the picture suggests a gay, low-budget War of the Roses, minus the mordant wit."

Gothamist

Seminal suburban California teen flick Fast Times at Ridgemont High is being <a href="Fast Times at Ridgemont High">screened at The Sunshine</a> Friday and Saturday night at midnight.

Gothamist

Anton Corbijn's <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2007/10/post_180.php">critically-acclaimed</a> Ian Curtis (Joy Division) biopic Control is being <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999852">screened at the IFC</a> tonight and Saturday at midnight.

Gothamist

For one week starting tonight, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/panic.html">Film Forum</a> has a newly-restored print of Al Pacino's pre-Godfather feature The Panic in Needle Park. J. Hoberman writes about the gritty 1971 "dope opera" <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/film/al-pacino-and-kitty-winn-rexamined-in-the-panic-in-needle-park/">in this week's Village Voice</a>: "Making his film debut as the hustler-junkie Bobby, 30-year-old Al Pacino went straight to The Godfather and on to Pacinodom... [He] is a force of nature. Chewing gum and chain-smoking Kools, this mop-topped motormouth is as wired as Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy and as cute as Woody Allen's Alvy Singer. 'I'm not hooked, I'm just chippin' Bobby tells smitten Helen, a little lost girl slumming with a vengeance."

Gothamist

Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>New in Town</em> or <em>Medicine for Melancholy</em>?