If you’re willing to travel, you can catch almost any recently released movies somewhere in the Valley. Here are our top five picks for what to see this weekend:
- “Arrival” – Amy Adams plays a linguist enlisted by the U.S. government to try to communicate with aliens, who have recently arrived on Earth. Jeremy Renner plays a mathematician who is also brought in to help. Smart science fiction.
- “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” – You don’t have to be a “Harry Potter” fan to enjoy the latest movie existing in that universe, but it wouldn’t hurt. Eddie Redmayne plays a collector of magical animals who comes to New York and promptly loses some of the animals. While finding them he gets involved in a dangerous development among wizards, who keep their identity secret in the U.S. The film is based on a book J.K. Rowling wrote in 2001, which was suppose to be a textbook Harry and his classmates used at Hogwarts.
- “Loving” – Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested for being married in 1958 – because he was white and she was black. The film follows their fight to make interracial marriage legal, a fight that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
- “Doctor Strange” – Another entry in the Marvel franchise. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character, a surgeon who seeks healing for injuries and winds up becoming a powerful sorcerer. Smarter than a lot of Marvel movies, and Cumberbatch leads a terrific cast.
- “The Edge of Seventeen” – Hailee Steinfeld plays a high-school junior whose complicated life gets worse when her best friend starts dating her brother. It’s another in a long line of similar films about high school kids finding themselves, but Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson, as her history teacher in whom she confides, make it better than most.
