New Movies In Theaters Jan 23rd - Rotten Tomatoes

New Movies In Theaters Jan 23rd - Rotten Tomatoes

There are three new films in wide release, one in limited national distro:

Mortdecai (2600 theaters)- could it be a new low in Johnny Depp's career? (13% positive reviews, 5.4 at IMDb) It's a comedy caper film with Johnny Depp playing the part of a silly rogue, the kind of part that would have gone to Terry-Thomas in an earlier day. Rated R for "some language and sexual material."

The Boy Next Door (2600 theaters) - could it be a new low in J-Lo's career? Well, probably not, because she was in Gigli back in her Affleck days, but this new one received only 13% positive reviews. The old codger has an affair with, then gets stalked by, a man would could be her great-grandson. (I'm joshin'. She's only 45 and looks spectacular.) Many critics called the film a total embarrassment, or words to that effect. Rated R for violence, sexual content/nudity and language. J-Lo told interviewers that she'd be naked in this film, but those scenes are not in the film, if they ever existed. As a consolation, a women named Lexi Atkins does full frontal and rear nudity about halfway in.

Strange Magic (3000 theaters) - could it be a new low in George Lucas's career? (9% positive reviews) Lucasfilm produced this animated, family-friendly musical inspired by Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Most critics just kinda tried to find a different way to say "WTF?" to this PG effort.

Cake (482 theaters) - a mediocre drama which earned Jennifer Aniston some award nominations from SAG and the Golden Globes. Hey, with 47% positive reviews, it seems like Schindler's List compared to the other releases this week.

Box Office: American Sniper is expected to win the weekend by a country mile for the second consecutive week. The Boy Next Door may get close to twenty million based on J-Lo name recognition. Strange Magic may pull about ten million because people need things to do with their kids, and Disney distributed the film. If Mortdecai had come out after Pirates of the Caribbean, it might have been a hit, but people now realize that most recent Johnny Depp movies bite the big one, so it may do even worse than J-Lo's "so bad it's bad" movie.