Hot Tickets! This Weekend's Movie Releases: The Sessions, Paranormal Activity 4, Alex Cross

Hot Tickets! This Weekend's Movie Releases: The Sessions, Paranormal Activity 4, Alex Cross

We’re entering something of a pre-Christmas lull in the land of the blockbuster movie but there is still plenty of activity in the land of cinema this weekend… and not all of it is paranormal.

The film that everyone is talking about this week is The Sessions. The movie – starring Helen Hunt, John Hawkes and William H Macy - debuted at the Sundance Festival earlier this year and wowed the critics with its “profoundly sex-positive” story. The Sessions tells the tale of a man, paralysed by polio, who seeks the help of a priest and eventually a sex therapist, to help him lose his virginity. The performances are touching, the script (based on the writings of California-based journalist Mark O’Brien) is tender and funny. If critical opinion is anything to go by, The Sessions should be heading towards the top of the box office chart.

You may well be wondering how on earth the makers of Paranormal Activity 4 can possibly continue making moviegoers jump out of their cinema seats. Judging by the reviews that have come in already, the general feeling is that we’re all a little bit tired of nice families moving into suburban homes and getting terrorized by poltergeists. Scoring a paltry 34% on Rotten Tomatoes, this fourth movie may well be the tipping point for the Paranormal Activity franchise; time for everyone to move on from what has now become a tired idea.

Alex Cross tells the tale of a homicide detective struggling with moral dilemmas as he finds himself on the tail of a particularly nasty serial killer. The movie stars Tyler Perry as Alex Cross, with Matthew Fox and Carmen Ejogo topping up the cast list. So far, the movie has not so much ‘failed to impress the critics’ as ‘completely repelled them.’ With an embarrassing score of 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, don’t expect Alex Cross to bother the top of the box office charts this weekend.