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).