The Visitor posterIf you are con­sid­er­ing going to the cin­e­ma this week­end, and you’ve already seen Bond and the oth­er 21 films cur­rent­ly play­ing in Welling­ton, here’s a quick guide to the new releas­es.

Cin­e­ma own­ers all over the city are breath­ing a lit­tle eas­i­er now that two of the biggest box office releas­es from the States have opened at the same time. High School Musi­cal 3: Senior Year is the third in the tril­o­gy and the first to get a full cin­e­ma release: Read­ings, Empire, Sky City Queens­gate. I saw it tonight at the Empire and my eyes and ears are still hurt­ing.

Knock­ing Bond off his perch last week­end in the US was the Christ­mas rom-com Four Hol­i­days star­ring  Vince Vaugh­an and Reese With­er­spoon. I believe I am out of step with most crit­ics but I actu­al­ly quite enjoyed it — and so did US$31m worth of oth­er peo­ple. Read­ings, Empire, Sky City Queens­gate.

Quar­an­tine is a very quick-out-of-the-blocks Hol­ly­wood remake of the Span­ish hor­ror film [REC] that Ant Timp­son was pro­mot­ing ear­li­er this year. It’s a Read­ings exclu­sive. Might be worth a look if, like me, you found it hard to read the sub­ti­tles in the orig­i­nal with your hands over your eyes.

The Vis­i­tor is going to be pop­u­lar, mark my words. From Thomas McCarthy, writer-direc­tor of The Sta­tion Agent (which did more busi­ness per capi­ta here than any­where else in the world), this one is about a depressed mid­dle-aged eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor who redis­cov­ers life when he meets an ille­gal immi­grant cou­ple in New York City. Oh man, it is so much bet­ter than I just made it sound. Pent­house, Para­mount, Light­house Petone.

The acclaimed doc­u­men­tary The Sur­vivors (about the final year of the Holo­caust) gets two screen­ings at the Film Archive on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day respec­tive­ly as part of their Human Rights series and final­ly, a Pent­house exclu­sive: Sud­den­ly, a Swedish dra­ma about a man and his son recov­er­ing from the death of the moth­er and broth­er. “A qui­et and beau­ti­ful film,” says IMDb.

The Vis­i­tor has already been reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes, with the oth­ers fol­low­ing next week (and in the Cap­i­tal Times next Wednes­day).

UPDATE: My inter­view with The Vis­i­tor star Richard Jenk­ins is up at F&S