Force the issue

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This article was published 26/11/2015 (3621 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just before a tsunami hits, water levels tend to go down.

If that natural phenomenon applies to movie box office, it’s the best explanation for the comparatively paltry amounts earned in multiplexes this fall, with flops that include Crimson Peak, The Last Witch Hunter and Our Brand Is Crisis.

Take heart, Hollywood. The tidal wave is coming. And it’s called Star Wars.

It’s full name is Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Dec. 18), the seventh episode of the franchise George Lucas begat in 1977, a long time ago in a film colony far, far away.

The fact that people are excited about this (and massive advance ticket sales prove it) is a testament to Lucas’s myth-making, even as the series leaves his hands and lights onto director J.J. Abrams, the guy who already proved his skill at reviving a moribund science-fiction series (and after Lucas’s ham-handed handling of Star Wars prequel episodes I-III, it’s safe to say the series was creatively in trouble) with his caffeinated reinvention of Star Trek.

Thus, what will be 2015’s biggest tent-pole release is set 30 years after Return of the Jedi, reuniting audiences with Han Solo, Leia, Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca while introducing us to new characters. These include a Force-ful young woman named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a renegade stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) as they join the rebel alliance.

Oops, sorry, “the Resistance.”

Big as it is, that’s just one of the movies competing for your dollars in this season’s crop of prestige films and would-be box office blockbusters.

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Krampus (Dec. 4) is a movie that plays on the horrors of the Christmas season from Michael Dougherty (the director of the delightful 2007 Halloween movie Trick ’r Treat). Krampus focuses on the titular demonic being more interested in punishing the naughty than rewarding the nice.

Director Ron Howard shoots for a good old-fashioned sea epic with In the Heart of the Sea n the Heart of the Sea (Dec. 11), which purports to tell the true story that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with Chris Hemsworth starring as a first mate who finds himself in a cursed relationship with a giant whale.

Valiantly taking on Star Wars’ day and date is Sisters (Dec. 18) starring comedy heavyweights Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as two disconnected sisters who reunite to clean out their old stuff before their parents sell the house they grew up in, and end up throwing a massive party for their equally unfulfilled former classmates.

Daddy’s Home (Dec. 25) reunites Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg (The Other Guys) as, respectively a committed stepdad and a freeloading biological dad competing for the affections of their kids.

Nobody asked for it, but we’re getting a remake of the 1991 action movie Point Break (Dec. 25) with Luke Bracey and Edgar Ramirez taking the roles once played by Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, plus loads of amped-up action in the vein of the Fast and Furious movies.

Carol may be released Dec. 25, but it’s no Christmas carol. Director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) directs this period lesbian love story, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, set in 1952. Cate Blanchett is Carol, a society matron who chooses not to resist her passion for a department store clerk (Rooney Mara).

Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a brilliant forensic neuropathologist in Concussion (Dec. 25). Omalu discovered CTE — a football-related brain trauma — and then fought an uphill battle with the National Football League trying to prove its existence.

Jennifer Lawrence reunites with Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell and stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro in Joy (Dec. 25). It’s a true story of a woman who defied the odds to found a business dynasty.

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Inevitably, Winnipeg has to wait a few extra weeks to see some movies released in December. Chief among these is The Hateful Eight (Jan. 8), a western-cum-drawing-room mystery starring Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tim Roth as a group of nasty varmints trapped together in Wyoming way station during a blizzard.

Even more rustic is The Revenant (Jan. 8), another adaptation of a true story of the 1820s, when frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) was attacked by a bear and left for dead in the American wilderness. It’s a state of affairs that sends him on a mission of revenge against his hunting buddies, whose numbers include Tom Hardy.

The last time we saw marionettes having explicit sex was in 2004’s Team America: World Police. Writer Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) takes a different approach with the stop-motion animated Anomalisa (January), an adult story of a motivational speaker whose chronic anxiety abates when he meets a woman on a speaking-tour stop in Cincinnati. David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh supply the voices.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca