Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

This week, Valley Cinemas holds over The Revenant, the Alejandro González Iñárritu's survival tale about Hugh Glass, the region's trapper scout in the early 1800s. The film has been validated by a Golden Globes win for the film, the director, and lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film is joined by the new animated sequel, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Road Chip, in which the 'munks conspire to come between their manager Dave (TV's Jason Lee), and his girlfriend. If you liked the novelty songs from 1958 on, their various manifestations leading up to the recent three films before this one, and have kids, you might enjoy this film. Perhaps not as stupid and transparently cynical in its commercialism as it may seem, as all the films so far have won or been nominated for music awards, often composed by top musicians and songwriters such as Bruno Mars, The Black-Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys, and others.

The Worx, the local video shop at 700 1/2 1st Ave N (228-4474) is going for the horror this week with the addition of Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, supposedly the last in the series, Sinister 2, another "single mother in an isolated house" thriller, and Hotel Transylvania 2, in which the cute monsters conspire to prevent one of the characters, Mavis (Selena Gomez) from leaving the establishment. Animated films have succeeded on slimmer premises. Maybe it will win a Gollum Globe.

The big film is, though, The Martian, which just won a few Golden Globes along with The Revenant. The Martian is based on that publishing phenomenon, the novel by science enthusiast Andrew Weir, and is faithful to the source, which doesn't always happen with movies helmed by the grouchy, bitter Ridley Scott (watch his Globe "acceptance" speech, in which he accepted nothing). Matt Damon is as solid as you'd expect him to be as the astro-botanist who finds himself trapped on Mars. Can he get back? Jeff Daniels, Jessica Chastain, Donald Glover and others are there to help. An Apollo 13 for the Mars-mad hobbyists, it's an entertaining film, but oddly somber in its bleakness about mistakes in space while putting on a brave face and springing to his inevitable happy ending.

At the Glasgow City-County Library (408 3rd Ave S, 228-2731), selections from the stacks include Inside Man, the most "normal" of Spike Lee's films, about a bank robbery in Manhattan, masterminded by Clive Owen, Monster, the sad story of serial killer Alieen Wournos, played to Oscar–winning perfection by Charlize Theron, and Chef, the cutesy comedy about a three-star cook whose mid-life crisis sends him to a food cart. Another welcome addition is the first season of Longmire, at that point still an A&E show. This first season's 10 episodes introduce the strong, silent Walt Longmire, played by Australian Robert Taylor, who has a thing against cell phones, as he tries to hold the peace and solve crimes involving the ranchers and Native Americans of Wyoming. Among the other characters imported from the source mystery novels by Craig Johnson, is Katee Sackhoff as deputy Victoria "Vic" Moretti, late of the Philadelphia police department, where she learned not to take sass, wolf whistles, or insinuations of incompetence from anyone. There is a "case of the week," but also an overriding mystery – who killed the person who killed Walt's wife? It may be that only Walt and his pal Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips) know for sure.