OTHER RELEASES

Other releases

Compiled by Martin Williams

M. Night Shyamalan, who wowed everyone with The Sixth Sense, has been struggling for a few years with unloved films like The Village and Lady in the Water. Now he’s back, and here’s the deal: An airborne toxin that leads people to kill themselves with spectacular gusto is spreading throughout the world, and a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg) must flee the carnage with his wife as the apocalypse closes in. There have been few advance screenings for this flick, which is never a good sign. Trivia: This is the first film by Shyamalan to receive an American “R” rating.

Michelle Pfeiffer is usually reason enough to see a movie, but this one may be an exception. Pfeiffer plays a TV producer and single mother who falls in love with an actor on her TV show who is 11 years her junior even as she raises a precocious daughter, battles industry creeps and receives visits from Mother Nature herself (Tracey Ullman). This semi-autobiographical comedy by veteran director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless) had disastrous luck in the hands of its distributor and was held up for more than two years before going straight to DVD in the US.

Here’s a morality tale about a Japanese high school student (Keiko Kitagawa, from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) who is just the pits. She exploits her “friends,” disrespects her parents, lies to former beaus and does just about everything she can to be horrid while trading on her alluring looks. Then she is diagnosed with cancer, and as she sickens, a classmate takes it upon herself to be her friend and visit her regularly in hospital. Secrets are then revealed and lives are changed forever. Older teens should lap this up.

Released in 2006, The Hamiltons is a sardonic, low-budget horror drama from the US that has generated a lot of interest in genre circles. Four siblings whose parents are deceased are forced to travel from town to town because two of them — twins — just can’t help abducting and killing people. Sort-of American Gothic family melodrama with bloody extras may impress anyone heartily sick of the “torture porn” direction American horror films are taking. But that isn’t to say that nasty stuff doesn’t happen in this unhappy family’s basement-cum-dungeon. Directed by The Butcher Brothers (a pseudonym used by writers/directors Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores) and shot on high-definition video. Starts tomorrow.