There’s something for everyone at the movies this week, from genre fare like Street Fighter and Whalefall to corset romance, with the new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. But if you don’t want to leave home, there’s also plenty to watch, from VOD to streaming. French auteur Luc Besson is back with his latest film, a new take on Dracula, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz.
Buddy is also available, following a group of kids trapped inside the surreal and creepy world of “It’s Buddy!”, a TV show hosted by an orange unicorn that looks a lot like Barney. Two much-discussed releases have also hit streaming: Hope, a South Korean film following a community under attack from an alien force that has one of the most controversial twists in recent memory, and Practical Magic 2, the legacy sequel starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Other releases include the action-packed Runner, starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, and The Death of Robin Hood, following Hugh Jackman as a weathered and jaded take on the legendary figure of English folklore.
Dracula or Dracula: A Love Tale reimagines the Bram Stoker classic, following Vlad the Impaler (Caleb Landry Jones) as a lovelorn soldier who, after losing his great love Elisabeta (Zoe Bleu), is cursed with immortality and transformed into Dracula. Four hundred years later, he encounters the reincarnation of the woman he lost, inspiring an obsession as well as the relentless pursuit of a vampire-hunting priest (Christoph Waltz). Dracula opens with similarly grandiose gestures.
Like the Coppola film, Besson’s movie declares more explicitly than Stoker’s novel that Count Dracula is actually real-life warrior-prince Vlad the Impaler, whose name (“Vlad Dracula”) inspired Stoker. In both Coppola and Besson’s tellings, Vlad renounces God and embraces vampirism following his wife’s death. In Besson’s version, Prince Vladimir (Caleb Landry Jones) is even more dedicated to his beloved Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) than to impaling his rivals; after a montage of the couple pawing at each other and smearing each other with porridge, fellow soldiers must literally peel Vladimir away from his beloved to lead his men in battle.
It’s Buddy! is a bright and colorful show for kids, starring a cute and plushy unicorn (voiced by Keegan Michael Key) who leads kids in song and dance. But the more the movie develops, the more we realize the twisted nature of the fictional TV show, where Buddy demands obedience and perfection from the children, pushing them to seek an escape towards the real world. Earlier this year, the indie horror phenomenon Obsession pulled off the impossible: it made more money on its second weekend in theaters than it did in its first.
This month, that happened again with another horror film, Buddy, which earned $5.3 million during the weekend of August 28, and then raked in another $5.7 million over Labor Day weekend. While that’s nowhere near Obsession's blockbuster numbers, it’s a big win for a horror flick with a mere $3 million budget. After its premiere at Cannes, Hope has been one of the most polarizing movies of the year, inspiring love and puzzlement in equal parts.
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