Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

It's a Star Wars New Year at Valley Cinemas. Star Wars: The Force Awakens stays on for a third week. It continues to be paired with the lame comedy Daddy's Home, this month's Will Ferrell enterprise. That's probably because there is no other "product," as theater operators sometimes call movies. But the New Year will bring good tidings as well. Coming up as possible VC candidates are The Revenant, the survival western partially set in Montana. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the real life scout Ned Glass, and Tom Hardy as the bad guy. Also coming up early in the year is a new Coen Brothers film, Hail, Cesar!, a kidnaping comedy set in old time movie industry. That's in February and in April comes the new Richard Linklater film, Everybody Wants Some, a comedy set in the world of college baseball.

At the Glasgow City-County Library (408 3rd Ave S, 228-2731), some of the available titles at GCCL include the novel adaptation The Life of Pi along with big screen hits Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Vietnam War, and the UFO fairy tale Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Worx, our local video shop at 700 1/2 1st Ave N (228-4474), has on offer the assassin action film Hitman Agent 47, which is fun in its way, and the dreary A Walk in the Woods, which should be called a sleepwalk in the woods, given how weakly Robert Redford and Nick Nolte phone in their performances. But on the other hand, the shop is also offering the interesting, unpredictable Bone Tomahawk. This is a western about a female doctor kidnapped by a tribe of cannibal "troglodyte" Indians. If you can't wait for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, here's another trek western with Kurt Russell (and edited by Tarantino's editor). Richard Jenkins, TV's Matthew Fox, and Zahn McClarnon also star in this low-key rescue mission that tracks the different methods in which a group of misfits deal with different dangers. It's not for everyone, but worth a try to the adventurous.

Coming shortly from the BBC and set to air on the Lifetime Channel is And Then There Were None. It's an Agatha Christie centenary, and so the network has adapted one of the author's most puzzling mysteries, about 10 people invited to a remote island with specious offers by a mysterious agent who then sets about to kill them off, one by one. On Lifetime, the three hour show will be divided into two parts on successive nights, ramping up the suspense as a judge (Charles Dance), a school teacher (Maeve Dermody), a retired general (Sam Neill), and a doctor (Toby Stephens), among others, try to crack the case before the hammer falls. You'll never guess the ending.