Summer Movies 2013 - Weekend By Weekend Schedule

Will the third Iron Man be a worthy follow up to last summer's The Avengers, or is this superhero series getting rusty? Will Gatsby be that great? And is Fast and Furious 6 really the most prestigious of the top films opening on Labor Day? It's gonna take a weekend-by-weekend schedule to figure it all out.

Friday, May 3

Iron Man 3

Kon-Tiki  (Oscar nominated this year for Best Foreign Lanuage Film )

Friday, May10

The Great Gatsby

Tyler Perry Presents Peeples (Kerry Washington, David Alan Grier)

About Time (Rachel McAdams)

Venus And Serena (Documentary)

 

Friday, May 17

Star Trek Into Darkness

The English Teacher (Julianne Moore, Greg Kinnear)

Frances Ha (comedy from director Noah Baumbach, introducing Greta Gerwig)

Friday, May 24

Fast and Furious 6

The Hangover: Part 3

Epic (Voices by Amanda  Seyfried, Beyonce, Colin Farrell)

Before Midnight (Sequel to Before Sunrise)

Penguins 3D

We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks (Documentary)

Friday, May 31
Now You See Me (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine)

After Earth (Will and Jaden Smith)

The East (Alexander Skarsgård)

Friday, June 7

The Internship (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn)
The Purge (Horror, Ethan Hawke)
The Kings of Summer (Sundance Film Festival hit, comedy)

 

Friday, June 14

Man of Steel

This is the End (Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Johan Hill, James Franco)

The Bling Ring (Sophia Coppola’s movie about  the Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch)

Stuck In Love (Jennifer Connelly, Greg Kinnear)

Twenty Feet From Stardom (Documentary on backup singers)

Friday, June 21

World War Z (Brad Pitt)

Monsters University (Pixar)

Much Ado About Nothing (Director Josh Whedon)

Friday, June 28

White House Down (Channing Tatum, Jaime Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Kick- Ass 2

The Heat (Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy)

I’m So Excited (Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

  

Friday, Wednesday, July 3

Despicable Me 2

Lone Ranger

Friday, July 5

Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain

The Way, Way Back (Steve Carell, Toni Collette)

Friday, July 12

Pacific Rim (Director: Guillermo del Toro)

Grown Ups 2

V/H/S/2 (Horror,thriller)

Friday, July 19

Girl Most Likely (Annette Bening, Kristen Wiig)

Turbo (Voices of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Sam Jackson, Snoop Dog/Lion)

RIPD (Ryan Reynolds, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Bacon, Mary-Louise Parker)

 

Friday, July 26

The Wolverine

Friday, August 2

Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)

The Smurfs 2

Red 2 (Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker)

300:Rise of An Empire

Friday, August 9

Elysium (Matt Damon)

Disney’s Planes

We’re the Millers (Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Ed Helms, Emma Robers)

Metallica Through The Never

Friday, August 16

2 Guns (Denzel Washington, Mark Wahlberg)

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara)

Haute Cuisine (Foodie film, portrait of the woman who fed French President Francois Mitterrand)

Friday, August 23

The World’s End (Edgar Wright science-fiction comedy)

The Mortal Instruments:City of Bones  (Young adult fantasy novel series)

You’re Next (Home invasion horror)

Friday, August 30

Closed Circuit (Eric Bana crime thriller)

This Is Us (One Direction documentary)

Getaway (Car movie with Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight)

42

“I want a player without the guts to fight back”

42 tells the inspiring story of legend Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey. Does the second film about legendary baseball hero Jackie Robinson finally hit it out of the park?

Well, it’s a pleasant walk-on-base at best. It’s a film that pays due respect to Robinson by showcasing him quite perfect. Keeping him so inspiring keeps the movie from being so. The story is a bit familiar and it plays out in a paint-by-numbers way.

I still enjoyed a lot of this in parts; there are a lot of nice scenes threaded together. The on field moments are beautiful and the camera work should please any baseball fan. Striking newcomer Chadwick Boseman makes a strong Jackie. And Ford, in the zone here at Branch, surprisingly plays it just right.

Simply put: A single, not a home run. A picture-perfect documentary with some inspirational moments, but not a film that stands on its on.

Award potential: Oscar is too many seasons away for an OK performance.

The ten buck review: Worth ten bucks. This is about as good as you can do in April, and it stands taller as a family film that could inspire discussion.

OZ The Great And Powerful

I don't want to be a good man. I want to be a great one.

And although this movie wants to be a great one, it winds up being, well, pretty good. Director Sam Raimi, best known for the first three Spider-Man movies, starts things out right with an inspired black and white opening that reveals Oz (James Franco) as a con artist magician.

The color opens up to a wonderful world of awe: lavish colors, spectacular costumes, a clever China Town, a dazzling Emerald City — and then the plot falls magically flat. Which witch is the evil one? Which witch gives the blandest performance of them all? A pre-story to the wizard is a great idea; it just didn’t work out here.

James Franco, my favorite goof, is so modern, self aware and cynical that he actually forces the annoying munchkins to stop singing. If there is any charm or innocence in this movie, the great Oz probably faked it.

Simply put: Not so great or powerful, but mildly entertaining

Award potential: This Oz won’t be off to see any Oscars. The effects and costumes are nice, but I bet 2013 will bring stronger contenders in all the visual categories.

The ten buck review: Not worth ten bucks.

Oscars Playbook: 10 stats you need to know to win your Oscars pool

Oscars Playbook: 10 stats you need to know to win your Oscars pool

1. Win the Visual Effect category

Historically, a Best Visual Effects nominee that also has a Best Picture nomination will always win. Last year, Best Picture nominee Hugo, won over Harry Potter, Real Steel, Rise of the Planet Apes and Transformers.

Bad news for Prometheus.

Also noteworthy, for seven of the past 10 VES Awards, the winner for outstanding VFX has gone on to win the Oscar in that category.

2. Composer John Williams always wins, right?

John Williams, competing in the original score category for Lincoln, has the most nominations of any living person with 48. But he’s only won it 5 times. His last win was for Schindler's List —in 1993.

3. Spielberg always wins, right?

Along with The Turning Point, Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple holds the record for most nominations, 11, without any wins. Spielberg’s Lincoln has 12 nominations this year.

4. Win the Best Costume category

Period movies have won Best Costume for 18 of the past 21 years. Exceptions were Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Dracula and Alice in Wonderland.

5. Forget how you’ve always voted in the past — for these 3 categories

New to this year, ALL members of the Academy (not just peers in the category) can pick the winners of:

Best Documentary Feature

Best Animated Short Subject

Best Live Action Short Subject

That means everyone from actors to musicians will have a say instead of just documentarians. Bet on something with a cute animal, just saying.

6. For tiebreakers that ask you to bet on the show’s running time, look to these trends.

In 2002, the show ran 4 hours and 23 minutes. Whew! But just like its ratings, the show has been getting smaller ever since. Here are the timings on the past five years:

2008: 3 hours, 21 minutes

2009: 3 hours, 30 minutes

2010: 3 hours, 37 minutes

2011: 3 hours, 15 minutes

2012: 3 hours, 14 minutes

7. Don’t use the Golden Globes as a crutch

It’s a fun show, but don’t use The Golden Globes as a guide for your Oscar Night picks. In the past 8 years, only 2 of the Golden Globe winners for Best Picture matched the Academy’s Best Picture winner (even though GG has TWO  chances to match up each year with both drama and comedy/musical categories).

8. Win the Best Sound Editing category

The loudest movie takes Best Sound Editing, period. Speed, Pearl Harbor and Bourne Ultimatum have all won Oscars.

9. Win the Best Foreign Language Film category

The foreign film that was playing at the Angelika Dallas during the week of the Oscars has won Best Foreign Language Film for 7 of the past 8 years.

10. Win the Best Picture category

We all know about needing a director nomination to win, but this year, sympathy for Affleck’s snub may actually help Argo win.

So consider these two facts instead: only nine movies have ever won best picture without a Best Film Editing nomination since the category was introduced in 1934. The most recent of which came 22 years ago, Ordinary People (1980).

And only two films in the last 57 years have won best picture without a Best Screenplay nomination, the most recent being Titanic (1997).

Good luck!

The Impossible

"Go and help people.”

The Impossible is based on a true story about a family vacationing in Thailand in 2004 when a cataclysmic earthquake in the Indian Ocean unleashed history’s most destructive tsunami.

The film begins with director Juan Antonio Bayona’s dynamo tsunami scene that surpasses Clint Eastwood's once-impressive one in Hereafter. Bayona captures the magnitude of the disaster’s effect on thousands of people in Thailand, but he soon moves to a more personal story. One that is haunting, poignant — and tough to watch at times.

The full cast does a remarkable job of convincing us of their personal struggles to tell us something about humanity. Mel Gibson and Anne Hathaway would have screamed through this; kudos to the subtle and refined Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.

Simply put: An astonishing real life story.

Award potential: Watts is the underdog to win Best Actress. Ewan McGregor’s category was too tough for someone who split the screen time with the her, and the film was also robbed of a nomination for Best Visual Effects.

The ten buck review: Worth ten bucks. Bring tissues.