Julie & Julia posterIt’s Labour Week­end and, as such, you can pret­ty much guar­an­tee that the weath­er will be filthy and the movies will be the place to be. So, what is there to choose from?

Nora Ephron made Sleep­less in Seat­tle back in the day (and wrote When Har­ry Met Sal­ly) and now she has cun­ning­ly merged two best-sell­ing books into one film — Julie & Julia. On one hand Julie Pow­ell (Amy Adams) attempts to cook every recipe in Julia Childs’ famous cook­book for a blog project and on the oth­er hand Meryl Streep por­trays the real Julia Childs and her trans­for­ma­tion from Amer­i­can intel­li­gence agent to one of the great cooks of Europe. Read­ings, Empire, Pent­house, Embassy (shar­ing with the Ital­ian Film Fes­ti­val), Light­house, Sky City Queens­gate.

If that isn’t enough food for you there’s the doc­u­men­tary Food, Inc. which is about our indus­tri­alised, cor­po­ra­tised, food pro­duc­tion and the dam­age it is doing to us and the plan­et. Read­ings, Para­mount, Light­house.

Read­ings is pur­su­ing the art­house mar­ket (using the oth­er­wise invis­i­ble Ange­li­ka brand) and is screen­ing James Toback­’s fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­men­tary about Mike Tyson, back from the Fes­ti­val. Their art­house cre­den­tials are brought into ques­tion some­what by the prox­im­i­ty of Saw VI, the lat­est in the sadis­tic, tor­ture-porn fran­chise and the big dumb sci-fi thriller Sur­ro­gates star­ring Bruce Willis. Both can also be found at Sky City Queens­gate, which also has an exclu­sive arrange­ment to screen the oth­er­wise straight-to-video Tin­ker­bell and the Lost Trea­sure for all those kids who are back at school.

All these films will be reviewed in the Cap­i­tal Times next week (and online at the new-look Funer­als & Snakes). Have your say in the com­ments.