What to Watch this Week (14-21 Nov)
The best things to watch this week on the big screen, the small screen and your laptop screen, including the Ghost in the Shell trailer, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the latest film from the “new Miyazaki”
What to watch online: Ghost in the Shell trailer
Wow. The first full trailer for the live action remake of classic anime Ghost in the Shell has just arrived online, and we’re still picking our chins off the floor. There’s been a lot of controversy with Scarlett Johansson landing the lead role over an Asian actor, but whitewashing aside, the Hollywood star looks to have brought a similar uncanny blankness to her cyborg character that helped make her man-killing alien in Under the Skin so chilling.
The trailer doesn’t give too much of the plot away for those not familiar with the anime and original manga, but it does promise high levels of badassery as we see Johansson’s robot assassin in twirling, gun-toting action while a reworked version of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence plays on the soundtrack. Released by Paramount 31 Mar 2017
What to watch in cinemas: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
By far the biggest release of the week is the cinematic return to the wizarding world of JK Rowling with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which follows Eddie Redmayne as a young British wizard travelling to America with a suitcase containing some of the eponymous beasties, which are soon running amuck in Manhattan.
The good news. One, the cast looks great, with Redmayne supported by Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell and Ezra Miller. Two, it’s directed by David Yates, who delivered many of the best entries in the Harry Potter series. Three, the early reviews have been ecstatic; Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called it “a terrifically good-natured, unpretentious and irresistibly buoyant film.”
The bad news, this is the first entry in a five-film franchise. Like the Harry Potter films, get set for exhaustion to set in long before the story concludes. Released 18 Nov by Warner Bros
Also worth a look: Dog Eat Dog
We’re delighted that New Hollywood veteran Paul Schrader is still making films, and we’re even more delighted that his latest is a cracker. “Dog Eat Dog is a Paul Schrader film, but not as we know it,” wrote our reviewer, Phil Concannon. “From the opening scene, which is reminiscent of Natural Born Killers in its delirious violence, this is a film that hurtles forward with a manic, unflagging energy and a complete disregard for the rules of storytelling or good taste… it's Schrader's best film in years.” Released 18 Nov by Signature Entertainment
Read our interview with Schrader: “Movies aren't going away”
Also worth a look: Your Name
Your Name, a new anime by Makoto Shinkai, has become a phenomenon in Japan. Since its release, it’s grossed 18.5 billion yen at the country's box-office, putting it the seventh biggest grossing film of all time in Japan, with only Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Frozen, Titanic and a trio of Hayao Miyazaki films (Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away, at number one) ahead of it.
“The first, most obvious element of Shinkai’s films that people notice is the mind-boggling beauty of the animation,” wrote Nathanael Smith in our preview to Scotland Love Anime’s Shinkai retrospective. “There’s a kind of hyper-realism to the look of his films, where unpolluted night skies contain whole galaxies and train stations gleam constantly beneath the sun.”
Might he be worthy of the title ‘new Miyazaki’? Check out Your Name, a curious body-swap mystery, when it’s released this week. Released 18 Nov by National Amusements
What to watch at home: Chevalier
The weird wave of Greek cinema that includes Attenberg and Dogtooth keeps on giving with Chevalier, from director Athina Rachel Tsangari, the director of Attenberg. It’s a biting study of the male ego that asks the question, What does 'being a man' mean in 2016? Our reviewer, Patrick Gamble, called it “an absurd buddy-comedy that reduces the masculinity-in-crisis debate into an extravagant pissing contest… A hilarious critique of traditional gender roles, Tsangari harnesses the comic potential of this Olympian clash of egos to create a mordant portrait of the 21st century man.” Released 14 Nov by StudioCanal