200801241353.jpgThere are at least two crack­ers in this week’s line-up. First­ly, John­ny Depp re-unites with Tim Bur­ton for faith­ful adap­ta­tion of Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed musi­cal Sweeney Todd: The Demon Bar­ber of Fleet Street. Depp is in his finest form (despite not hav­ing a Broad­way-strength voice) and is joined by a won­der­ful cast includ­ing Hele­na Bon­ham Carter, Alan Rick­man, Tim­o­thy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen. Read­ings, Empire, Sky City Quensgate.

“The West Wing” cre­ator Aaron Sorkin returns to DC to script Char­lie Wilson’s War: the true sto­ry of a rene­gade but prin­ci­pled play­boy Con­gress­man (Tom Han­ks) who almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly fund­ed the Afghan resis­tance to the Sovi­et inva­sion in the 1980s. I was sur­prised to see this wasn’t nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar in the Best Adapt­ed Screen­play cat­e­go­ry but Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man is in there as Sup­port­ing Actor for his excel­lent turn as impolitic CIA oper­a­tive Gust Avrako­tos. You can see this one at the Embassy, Read­ings and Sky City Queens­gate.

[The rest of this week’s new release sum­marised after the jump…]

The Jane Austen Book Club is also an adap­ta­tion (of Karen Joy Fowler‘s best sell­er about a group of women who get togeth­er to read Austen‘s books and dis­cov­er the unlike­ly par­al­lels with their own lives). It fea­tures a strong cast includ­ing Maria Bel­lo, Emi­ly Blunt, Kathy Bak­er, Jim­my Smits and Hugh Dan­cy. Per­fect Pent­house-fod­der and, sure enough, it plays there and at the Light­house in Petone.

Epic Movie was very near the top of my list of worst films of 2007 and, some­how, the mak­ers of that fias­co have been giv­en anoth­er chance with Meet the Spar­tans. Of course, the fact that Epic Movie made near­ly a mil­lion dol­lars in NZ alone might have some­thing to do with it: Read­ings and Sky City Queens­gate only.

There’s a spe­cial bonus this week­end: sneak pre­views of sur­prise Best Pic­ture nom­i­nee Juno at Read­ings, Rial­to, Pent­house and Sky City Queens­gate. Also, sneak­ing this week­end is Leonar­do Di Caprio’s envi­ron­men­tal doc­u­men­tary The 11th Hour: Rial­to, Light­house Petone and Pent­house.

Sweeney Todd has already been reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes and the oth­ers will show up next Wednes­day (and in the Cap­i­tal Times the same day). Also at F&S today are a cou­ple of thoughts on the recent Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tions includ­ing a shout out to Welling­ton­ian Mike Hop­kins for yet anoth­er Oscar nod — this time as Super­vis­ing Sound Edi­tor on Trans­form­ers.