Marley & Me posterThis has to be the most mid­dle-of-the-road week for new cin­e­ma since I start­ed these lit­tle updates. Check these out:

First up Mar­ley & Me, a rom-com-weepy best-sell­er adap­ta­tion star­ring Jen­nifer Anis­ton and Owen Wil­son as a cou­ple who adopt a pup­py. Click here for the Defamer.com spoil­er. Read­ings, Empire, Light­house Petone, Sky City Queens­gate. Then we have He’s Just Not That Into You, the first film to be based on a best-sell­ing book based on a throw­away line of dia­logue from “Sex and the City”: Read­ings, Empire and Sky City Queens­gate.

Changeling is the sec­ond Clint East­wood film to be released in less than a month (Gran Tori­no is still doing good box office). Angeli­na Jolie plays a sin­gle moth­er in 1928 LA whose son goes miss­ing. When the LAPD recov­er the child she is dis­traught to dis­cov­er that they’ve giv­en her the wrong child (Read­ings, Empire and Pent­house). Wel­come to the Sticks was well-received at the Film Fes­ti­val last year and by all accounts the dread­ful trail­er does it no favours. It’s a broad French class com­e­dy about a city slick­er sent to work in the provinces, direct­ed by and star­ring Dany Boon (My Best Friend): Pent­house, Light­house Petone.

Mean­while, for Fri­day the 13th we have a remake of the orig­i­nal Fri­day the 13th hor­ror (the 80s clas­sic fea­tur­ing hock­ey-masked Jason off­ing unsus­pect­ing teens all over Crys­tal Lake): Read­ings only. Sneak pre­view­ing this week at Read­ings is anoth­er hor­ror re-make, My Bloody Valen­tine in dig­i­tal 3D. I’m watch­ing both this week­end — wish me luck.

As always, the Para­mount bucks the trend with some­thing a lit­tle more eso­teric and thought­ful. The mak­ing of Son of a Lion is an inter­est­ing sto­ry: Aus­tralian ambu­lance offi­cer Ben­jamin Gilmour trav­elled to the remote Afghan/Pakistan bor­der with a cam­era and made a fea­ture film using the locals as actors. Vari­ety said Gilmour “achieves fine results from an untrained cast whose expres­sive per­for­mances make the tale feel authen­tic at every turn.”

Final­ly, a mas­ter­piece by a gen­uine artist: Steve McQueen’s Hunger (about the IRA hunger strikes in the ear­ly 80s) deserved­ly won the Cam­era D’or at Cannes last year as well as the Evening Stan­dard Award for Best British Film. It’s des­per­ate­ly sad but bril­liant and is a Para­mount exclu­sive.

Changeling and Hunger have already been reviewed at Funer­als & Snakes, I’ll get to the oth­ers next Wednes­day (and in the Cap­i­tal Times on the same day).