First up, there's Beauty and the Beast, the highly-anticipated remake of the Disney animated classic. Disney has been doing this a lot lately, taking their back catalogue of animated films and turning them into live-action remakes. This has been kind of a mixed bag - sometimes you get Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which I still maintain is one of the worst movies I've ever seen; other times you get something like The Jungle Book or Pete's Dragon, both of which were very good and arguably better than the movie they're based on. It sounds like Beauty and the Beast falls somewhere in the middle - it's getting mostly solid reviews, but there's kind of a pervading sense of... "what was the point of this?" It doesn't seem like it's reinterpreting anything from the original or adapting it in a new way - it's just a live-action version of the same story. It's got a great cast which includes Emma Watson as Belle, and if you like the original there should be something to enjoy here, but it doesn't seem like it's an essential film.

Meanwhile, if you're a horror fan, you may have heard some buzz surrounding The Belko Experiment, which also opens this week. The movie is about an office building in which all the employees are locked inside and told to kill their co-workers in order to get out. It's getting pretty mixed reviews, but what makes this movie noteworthy is that it's written by James Gunn, the man who now directs the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel, but who got his start making weird, off-kilter movies like Slither, a movie where Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks fight off alien brain-mutating space bugs (sidenote: that movie is awesome). So despite the reviews, The Belko Experiment has enough pedigree going for it that it should be worth checking out if you're a horror fan.

Finally, this is opening in limited release this week, but I did want to briefly mention that T2: Trainspotting is coming out - this is the sequel to the 1996 drug addiction drama Trainspotting, picking up to see what these characters have been up to 20 years later. Director Danny Boyle returns as does most of the cast, including Ewan McGregor in the lead role - I was surprised this movie was made, and even more surprised that all of these characters are somehow still alive - I mean, have you seen Trainspotting? These guys were some serious heroin addicts - but I'm pretty happy to say that reviews have been surprisingly strong, so if you can see this and you like the original, this is definitely one to go see.

So a solid smattering of options this weekend, a little something for everyone which is always nice, I'm Meat Sandwich and until next time, we'll Meat at the Movies

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