Watch List Weekly Recap 1/6/23

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”

What we’re looking forward to this year: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, a Robert Oppenheimer biopic (above), and a thriller about a cocaine-addled bear (you’ll never guess what it’s called: “Cocaine Bear”). All that and more in the 2023 Watch List movie preview.

32 Movies (and 5 Indictments) I'd Like to See in 2023.

In many respects, the upcoming movie year looks like a continuation of Hollywood’s blockbuster business as usual. There will be a new “Hunger Games,” a remake of “The Exorcist,” a Willy Wonka origin story (“Wonka”) starring Timothée Chalamet. There will be superhero extravaganzas from Marvel/Disney and DC/Warner Brothers, the two corporate behemoths locked in a battle to keep us locked in eternal adolescence. There will be sequels – oh, boy, will there be sequels. You can tick them off on both hands: “Dune Part 2, “Creed III,” “John Wick Chapter 4,” “Scream 6,” “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning” (a.k.a. “M:I 7”), “Fast X” (a.k.a. “The Fast and Furious 10”). I’m afraid some producer out there is planning to buy the rights to “Catch-22” assuming it’s a franchise.

Ty Burr's Watch List

The weekly roundup of movies in theaters and on demand, to attend to or to avoid. Your best bets: Kore-eda’s “Broker,” the eerie “Nanny” on Amazon Prime, and an Edgar Allan Poe murder mystery on Netflix. Proceed with caution: The crowd-pleasing but mawkish “A Man Called Otto,” with Mr. Thomas Hanks (above).

What To Watch: Whistling in the Dark Edition

There are some decent movies arriving in theaters and on demand this week, but the most transfixing entertainment – the most simultaneously hilarious and depressing – has been the Schadenfreude Sh*tshow Follies currently unfolding in the US House of Representatives, where Kevin McCarthy is being consumed, inch by peristaltic inch, by the boa constrictor…

Ty Burr's Watch List

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