Movie Nation

“Of Gods and Men” is a quietly compelling and sober-minded, if not particularly emotional treatment of an infamous incident in the global clash of “Islamo-fascism” and the West. In Algeria in the mid-90s, a small monastery of Trappist monks elected to stay on duty, providing health care to the village where they lived, despite the rising danger all around them.

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Pairing up Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu pays dividends in the daft feather-light French farce “Potiche,” a period piece designed to remind us of just how far and how fast women have come in the Western world.

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A few friends in the business have seen cuts of this and expressed appreciation.

“John Dies at the End” has drugs that allow people to travel through time and other dimensions. They return — not quite human.

Can a couple of losers, who have figured this out, save the world?

“John Dies at the End” opens in limited release Jan. 25.

“Zero Dark Thirty” goes into wide release this weekend (my review here) and looks to be the big weekend winner, pulling in some $25 million at the box office.

Other Oscar nominated pictures, including “Lincoln” and “Life of Pi,” saw a big Friday night spike in attendance as well.

“Django” took a pretty big Oscar dip. Does it finally seem like damaged goods?

“Gangster Squad,” dismissed by some, praised as a gangster Western by me (review here) is headed toward what may be a sub-$20 million weekend, based on Friday’s numbers. I doubt if the word of mouth will be that bad on it, so we’ll see what Saturday’s numbers show.

“A Haunted House,” a lumbering comedy in the “Paranormal Black-tivity” vein (Marlon W. would appreciate that, my review here) is doing quite well — upper -$teens.

Like an old friend whose mere memory brings tears, “56 Up,” the latest film in the greatest cinematic experiment in sociology and psychology ever attempted, returns to theaters. Every seven years, a new installment in “Seven Up!”, an updated feature film boiled down from the British TV documentary series, reminds us of our mortality even as we see the years pass for the British subjects of these films.

The world met them in “Seven Up!”, fourteen British children representing what was then, a pretty broad sample of British society – poor East End tykes, orphans, a child of mixed race, a country boy, and the posh-accented scion of landed gentry and the professional classes.

Every seven years we see how Jackie and Lynn, Tony, Suzy, Symon, Neil and the others have changed – how the attitudes and personalities they expressed as talkative seven year-olds have manifested themselves in adult life.

It’s an exploration of that Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Are we really fully formed at seven?

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“It’s a win-win situation,” we hear people say, often to assure us that something they’re doing that’s counter to your interests is actually just as much to your advantage as theirs.

That’s what Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) tells himself when he signs himself up to be a new client’s legal guardian. He’s a struggling lawyer in rural New Jersey, a good guy who has also taken on the thankless job of coaching the high school wrestling team. The old man (Burt Young) forgets things and needs to be in a group home. The state thinks so. And since there are no living relatives Mike can track down, Mike takes on the paid job of looking after the man’s life and his affairs.

Mike gets paid, the old man gets to stay in his home, “Win Win.” Only Mike doesn’t let him stay in his house. He puts him in a retirement home — out of sight, out of mind. Sure, he lied to the judge and his wife (Amy Ryan). But they need the money, and at least he’ll look in on the client, right? The judge doesn’t need to know.

“Win Win” is about what happens after this unethical act by an essentially moral man. It’s the most entertaining and accessible film from the director of perfectly accessible and entertaining “The Visitor,” Thomas McCarthy. So that’s saying something.

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