In Theatres: a creepy, creepy farmhouse

The Conjuring

James Wan’s The Conjuring looks like horror-film-fan candy. I watched the trailer and felt tears welling up in my eyeballs and goosebumps all over my body. When one of these films starts with “based on a true story,” my heart dies a little. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson play Lorraine and Ed Warren, ghost hunters, who confront a presence, unlike anything they’ve ever experienced, in an old farmhouse.

Robert Schwentke’s R.I.P.D. stands for Rest In Peace Department. The film stars Ryan Reynolds as a recently slain police officer Nick Walker, who gets partnered with cowboy-esque Roy Pulsipher (Jeff Bridges). The department exist to allow deceased police officers to fight crime in the afterlife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07xNrVd7DU

Continuing along with more summer action, Bruce Willis returns to the role of Frank Moses in Red 2, the sequel to the 2010 film. Moses is a retired CIA agent who gets called back to duty when there’s a missing portable nuclear device. The film offers a pretty epic cast that includes Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovitch, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mary-Louise Parker.

Nicolas Refn’s Only God Forgives has received mixed reviews — but how wrong can you go with Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas? Gosling is Julian, a drug smuggler in Bangkok whose brother has just been murdered. His mother (Scott Thomas) demands he finds and kills the person responsible.

Everyone loves a bad-ass Gosling. Everyone.

You can also check out Rufus Norris’s coming-of-age story Broken, about Skunk (Eloise Laurence), a young girl living in North London who witnesses a violent altercation between neighbours that calls to questions many of her beliefs. The film is based on the titular novel by Daniel Clay which was inspired by Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. ■