Dane DeHaan

Time and time again, Gore Verbinski has been thoroughly played by the flighty attitudes of moviegoers and Hollywood executives. His delightful animated Western Rango wrongfully doesn’t enjoy the stature of Pixar and Disney’s recent successes, and his take on The Lone Ranger is remembered today as a massive flop instead of the generously enjoyable spoof it was...

There’s no shortage of kid-friendly movies that promote the importance of following your dreams and achieving your true potential. (I suspect in part because any Hollywood screenwriter who has sold a feature-length script has necessarily realized their dreams — easy for them to say.) Youngsters will get yet another lesson on the absolute vitality of dream-chasing this spring, when the new animated feature Leap! leaps into theaters on March 3. Dreams shall be followed, and what’s more, a little cartoon Dane DeHaan will speak explicitly about following those same dreams, just to be sure that no child leaves the theater unclear. To quote Jon Heder’s answering machine message in the figure-skating comedy vehicle Blades of Glory: if you can dream it, you can do it!

2016 was a hell of a year for horror, from the high-literary chills of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House to ‘cult classic’ The Invitation to rigorously designed colonial freakout The Witch to the stripped-down nightmare of Don’t Breathe. 2017’s already looking like it’ll be able to give this year’s chills a run for their money, though; the advance reviews for M. Night Shyamalan’s multiple-personality abduction thriller Split have been improbably positive, the trailer for Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out looks absolutely bonkers, and Gore Verbinski has given February a shot in the arm (pun extremely, shamelessly intended) with his upcoming psych ward-set feature A Cure for Wellness.

So far, A Cure For Wellness seems to be fulfilling the promise of Gore Verbinski’s return to the horror genre, and by that I mean it looks totally bonkers. And according to early reactions out of last weekend’s BNAT film festival in Austin, “bonkers” might be an understatement. Between those reactions and this wacky new international trailer, Verbinski’s latest is quickly becoming one of my most anticipated films of 2017.

Unless you keep a close eye on the Austin, Texas film scene, you might not have known that audiences were treated to a special advance screening of Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness this weekend as part of the annual Butt-Numb-A-Thon. This yearly film marathon  —  hosted each year by Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles  —  often features an enticing mixture of classic genre movies and upcoming releases, and this year, both Verbinski and lead actor Dane DeHaan showed up for a special advance screening of their 2017 release. And if Twitter is to believed, it’s extremely disturbing and absolutely insane. Sounds perfect.

If you loved The Fifth Element (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then you’ll be excited for the latest sci-fi visual creation to pop out of the mind of Luc Besson. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks even more wacky than that 1997 sci-fi adventure based on the first trailer.

At the uppermost level, corporate culture has taken a turn for the New Agey. Silicon Valley has amply parodied the recent fad of nebulously defined spiritualism among the top players in the start-up world, where CEOs journey into the desert for days at a time to trip on ayahuasca and come up with a name for their newly integrated media vertical, or whatever. Corporate types have begun to act like Burning Man attendees, and with his upcoming psychological thriller A Cure for Wellness, Gore Verbinski puts a horrifying spin on this spreading trend.

After costing Disney a pretty penny (or millions of them) with The Lone Ranger and having his North Korea thriller with Steve Carell nixed by New Regency, Gore Verbinski has finally returned with a new film. Originally scheduled to hit theaters this year, A Cure for Wellness was pushed back to February 2017, but a pair of mysteriously creepy viral promos should get you pretty excited for The Ring director’s return to the horror genre.

2017 is already shaping up to be a much more promising year for big studio blockbusters than 2016. In addition to the newly-titled Blade Runner 2049, we’re getting the Wolverine sequel (titled Logan), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming. For less conventional blockbuster fare, there’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Luc Besson’s long-developing sci-fi epic, which now has an official poster (along with a few new images).

French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said that all you need for a good movie is a girl and a gun. If the trailer for Two Lovers and a Bear is any indication, Godard probably meant to say, “a girl and a polar bear,” but we’ll forgive him for not knowing this was a possibility at the time.