Blair Witch:

16 years after the original Blair Witch Project made hundreds of millions of dollars on an investment of less than $50,000, we are back in the same woods outside of Burkitsville, Maryland, although this time the filming location is Vancouver.  James (James Allen McCune) has reason to believe, after seeing a video snippet, that his sister Heather, who vanished with the original Blair Witch group, may still be alive.  He and three friends decide to go into the same woods looking for the same thing that the first group pursued … the difference is that this time, it’s clear that something is chasing them.  An encounter with a very strange couple who offer to guide them through the darkness and the bush adds an interesting twist, and soon they realize that they are all lost … and they also realize that night has been in effect for almost two days.  There are some good make-you-jump moments here, and it’s a far better horror film that the original … but expect to see the friends picked off one-by-one as they approach the secrets that these woods harbor.  Rated 14A.

Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life:

I’m not the target audience for this movie about young people who decide not to follow the rules, so it turned out to be the worst two hours of my life, but for those who will relate to the characters strapped into the creativity-killing regimen of public school, it will work just fine.  Rafe is a quiet young man, he’s good at cartooning, and he knows his way around a video game or two.  The problem is that everything he is good at has little to do with what is being taught in school.  He and his friends come up with an idea – how about working diligently to break every single rule that the school offers up?  That’s their mission, and some of the expected push back occurs when the teachers catch on. Lauren Graham (The Gilmore Girls) also stars.  Rated PG.

Denial:

Based on actual events, this is a courtroom drama in which a British woman named Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) has accused a man named David Irving (Timothy Spall) of being a Holocaust denier.  He sues her, and under British law, the burden of proof is on the accused, so she must now prove, in a court of law, that the Holocaust occurred in order to defend her position.  Much of the dialogue was taken word-for-word from the original court documents, which makes, at times, for a very lengthy, and sometimes a very dull series of events.  The nature of this story is such that it is important on any levels, and it’s an interesting study in both British law and the approach that some people take to actual historical events.    Rated 14A.

The Intervention (2016):

 Actress Clea Duvall makes her directorial debut with this movie, which she also scripted.  She is best known for her acting in Argo and Addicted to Fresno on the big screen, and her recurring roles on Veep and American Horror story on television.  The story here has a group of friends, several couples, invited for a weekend getaway in which the couple in question expects nothing but a good time, but learn once on site, that this is really an orchestrated intervention into their marriage, which is creating difficulties for many.  Stars Vancouver's Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother, Jack Reacher) who appears as a character with a broken leg ... which is the real thing, because the day before filming began, she actually broker her leg playing with her children, so the injury was written into the script.  Rated 14A.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016):

This is a sci-fi thriller from JJ Abrams that was promoted as coming from the same universe as 2008's Cloverfield, in which huge monsters ravaged New York City.  Here, we follow a young woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who is in a car accident in a rural area, and comes to in what turns out to be an elaborate underground bunker that was built by Howard (John Goodman), who tells her that the outside world is uninhabitable and that they must stay below ground for the foreseeable future.  A young man is also a captive, having arrived under similar circumstances.  Is Howard telling the truth, or is he some kind of strange and perverse captor?  The sci-fi elements come too late in the movie to save it from its plodding script.  Rated 14A.