Audiences love watching the “Paranormal Activity” films, which concern people looking at computer screens.
Credit: Paramount Pictures
1. ‘Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones’
The fifth entry in the deathless found footage series loses “Catfish” directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman but gains Michael Landon’s son (promoted after writing the other sequels). There’s probably ghosts.
2. ‘Beyond Outrage’
Sixtysomething filmmaker/star Takeshi Kitano follows up his 2010’s yakuza saga “Outrage,” with a threatened threequel in the works. Hopefully this one features less squirm-inducing moments like the first one’s dentist scene.
3. ‘Interior. Leather Bar’
One of the ten thousand movies James Franco directed last year finally gets a release. This one recreates footage chopped from William Friedkin’s notorious Al Pacino-starring gay S&M film “Cruising,” which ought to temper those gay rumors.
4. ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
Martin Scorsese returns to the “Goodfellas” genre he created with this look at Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a real-life super-broker who in the ‘90s swindled innocent people out of hundreds of millions, all while surrounding himself with drugs, hookers and flying dwarves.
5. ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’
James Thurber’s slender short story about a shy daydreamer has been in the works for decades, only to wind up a Ben Stiller film about taking the bull by the horn — you know, exactly the opposite message of the source.
6. ‘Grudge Match’
Two movie boxing legends — Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone — duke it out in this dramedy, though the real bout is over which one will escape with their dignity.
7. ’47 Ronin’
A much-filmed true Japanese story — which already became a 1941 masterpiece by Kenji Mizoguchi — gets fitted with American money, plus dragons, weird beasts, shapeshifting henchwomen and sad Keanu.
8. ‘Frozen’
The Hans Christian Anderson favorite “The Snow Queen” gets Disneyfied in its latest cartoon extravaganza, which also makes room for a talking snowman (Josh Gad).
9. ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’
Peter Jackson’s hubristically super-sized version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s first, slender trip to Middle Earth enters its second three-hour installment, with Martin Freeman’s hairy-footed adventurer fighting spiders, Orcs and a great big dragon.
10. ‘August: Osage County’
Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Margo Martindale, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Sheppard, Julianne Nicholson do a lot of acting.
