YOUR GUIDE TO THIS WEEK'S NEW CINEMA RELEASES

A smorgasbord for movie lovers this week!

TOP PICK TO SEE

Without any doubt, the top pick for this week is SICARIO. An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by an elected government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico. I saw this movie at a prescreening and it is brilliant! ****1/2 stars for me - I’ll post my review very soon.

OTHERS TO SEE

THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL is about a teen artist living in 1970s San Francisco who enters into an affair with her mother's boyfriend. It’s rating highly with critics and general viewers and, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy, it’s A remarkably vibrant and frank look at one precocious teen's emerging sexual life - a film with the stuff of life coursing through its veins and sex very much on its brain.

MAYBE/MAYBE NOT

I’m not sure about LONDON ROAD. It’s an adventure, musical, mystery that documents the events of 2006, when the quiet rural town of Ipswich was shattered by the discovery of the bodies of five women. The residents of London Road had struggled for years with frequent soliciting and kerb-crawling on their street. When a local resident was charged and then convicted of the murders, the community grappled with what it meant to be at the epicentre of this tragedy. I’ve seen the trailer and the fact that it is a musical puts me off a bit. The combination of the themes (true crime) with singing is hard to imagine. I’ll let you know what I think when I’ve seen it. If you check it out, please come back here and let us know what you think.

If you’ve seen the trailers of THE VISIT, you’ll know it looks very creepy. The story is about a single mother who finds that things in her family's life go very wrong after her two young children visit their grandparents. The thing is, this movie is billed as a COMEDY horror. For Screen International’s Charles Gant, THE VISIT is A marketable slice of hit-and-miss mischief that doesn't suggest a career rebirth so much as a larky side project that will yield more in the way of nervous laughter than quickened pulses. General viewers are rating it around 3-3.5 stars and critics a bit lower — 2.5-3 stars. The decision is yours!

CUT SNAKE is a new Australian thriller in which a pair of ex-cons hatch a scheme to burn down a nightclub in Brisbane. That’s all I know about this one — so I’ll fill you in once I’ve managed to catch up with it.

Finally, PAN is an origin story for the character of Peter Pan that we are all so familiar with. This story starts when Peter is an orphan who is spirited away to the magical Neverland. There, he finds both fun and dangers, and ultimately discovers his destiny — to become the hero who will be forever known as Peter Pan. Critics don’t like this one, averaging around 1.5-2 stars. But I enjoyed it — it’s **** stars for me which is a little higher than the average rating for general viewers. I’ll tell you why I liked it when I post my review shortly.

That's it for this week. See you at the movies!

*NOTE* Movie summaries are adaptations of movie summary on IMDB. Opinions are mine unless credited. These updates are written from an Australian perspective so openings of the movies in cinemas may vary in other parts of the world.