The Lego Movie:  

A brilliant 96 minute-long commercial that will make every young boy and young girl who ever put together a Lego project want more, and more, and more.  In fairness, it’s a pretty good movie, in which Emmett, a regular, run of the mill Lego person, follows all the rules, follows the instruction on everything, and is very happy with his simple life.  He is slowly becoming aware though, that the Man at the Top is moving towards destroying the world in which Emmett and those that he loves, call home.  Interesting animation, and it helps if you understand Lego just a little – but either way, it’s a great caper story with an interesting outcome.  Voice of Will Ferrell is behind several of the characters … and Batman is easily my favourite. Rated PG.

Left Behind:  

Nicolas Cage takes on the role played by Kirk Cameron in the lower-budget version of this contemporary Christian story from the year 2000.  This one isn’t a lot better, full of bad special effects and worse dialogue – clearly taken on by Cage as a paycheque.  He plays airline pilot Rayford Steele, flying nearly 200 passengers into the night when the Rapture occurs – that event foretold in Scripture in which all the righteous people are spirited off to heaven, leaving the rest to deal with the coming of the Anti-Christ.  Steele isn’t one of the lucky ones, and he has a planeload of people, many of which have just seen their children and other loved ones disappear.  It’s just fine for those wanted to sense what this event might be like. Rated 14A.

Get On Up: 

Chadwick Boseman (42 – The Jackie Robinson Story) takes on another real person also deceased, the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Dynamite, James Brown. This is truly a warts-and-all presentation in which we follow young James from his days in the American South where he was abandoned by his mother and treated cruelly by his father, through the beginnings of his musical journey, and many relationships that he treated in much the same fashion as he himself had been treated – with cruelty and abandonment.  Along the way we hear some great music and develop an understanding of what made James Brown the man he was. Rated PG.

War of the Dead (2011):

A no-name cast stars in this World War II story of a team of American and Finnish soldiers who encounter a group of German soldiers in a bunker.  Their job – take the bunker and make the way safe for the next wave of Allied troops.  The problem:  the German soldiers won’t stay dead.  Soon it’s apparent that they are the undead, with the non-living Germans putting up a great fight.  The horror begins when the Allied troops enter the bunker and find out how  the Germans became undead.  Rated 18A.

My Summer in Provence (2014):  

Jean Reno stars in this French production that follows three siblings who go to visit their grandfather whom they have never met because of a long-standing family dispute.  Within 24 hours the kids are caught up in the drama too.  This is a sentimental, and most enjoyable film that features modern France and modern families in an unusual light.  Rated PG.