Movies you should watch this week

the revenant

Now that the holidays are fully in the rear view mirror, we can all look forward to the return of winter movies and the summer’s big time hits to land on home video. While television continues to come out of its mid season hibernation, theaters host an interesting mix of offerings. This Friday the two major offerings will be The Revenant starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy along with the horror film The Forest starring Natalie Dormer. Meanwhile, The Martian, and Mr. Robot season one debut on home video.

The Revenant

Last year, Alejandro González Iñárritu blew viewers away with the seemingly single take feature film Birdman, and now he’s ready to wow moviegoers again this Friday with The Revenant starringLeonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Domhnall Gleeson. While the previous entry examined how actors interact with their material, this one features DiCaprio’s incredibly resilient Hugh Glass doing his best to survive everything from a bear attack and betrayal to attacks from the local Arikara tribe. By the way, if you’ve been seeing these commercials and wondering what a “revenant” is, but forgot to look it up, it means someone who returns potentially as a ghost.

The Forest

Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer takes center stage in The Forest, a film about a young woman named Sara who heads to Aokigahara Forest, known as the suicide forest, at the base of Mt. Fuji. She’s there to find her twin sister who has gone missing. After leaving the designated path, Sara starts seeing a variety of visions that understandably freak her out. We can’t say for sure whether this horror movie hitting in January will be the best of the year, but it certainly has one of the more intriguing masked killers we’ve seen in a while, so that’s something. The Forest opens this Friday.

The Martian

Legendary director Ridley Scott returned to the big screen last year with The Martian, a film about Matt Damon‘s astronaut Mark Watney trying to survive on Mars after a storm ruined his chances of evacuating with the rest of his crew. The stellar cast includes Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Michael Peña, Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Donald Glover, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, and Sebastian Stan. The film hits home video next week.

Mr. Robot

USA’s Mr. Robot might have been one of the more surprising TV hits of the season. Critics and viewers alike have praised the show starring Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity expert dealing with anxiety and depression who gets recruited into Mr. Robot’s group of hacker activists. The first season got nominated for a slew of awards so it’s a great time to catch up when it hits home video next Tuesday.

So that’s what we’re watching, what about you? Let us know in the comments.