In Theaters This Weekend: Reviews of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘The Belko Experiment,’ ‘T2: Trainspotting’

A tale as old as time, a deadly social experiment and a heroin addict are headed to theaters this weekend in Beauty and the Beast, The Belko Experiment and T2: Trainspotting. Also in theaters are the Ryan Gosling and Roony Mara starrer Song to Song and Jacob Tremblay’s Burn Your Maps.

Read on to find out what The Hollywood Reporter’s critics are saying about the weekend’s new offerings (as well as which film will likely top the weekend box office).

Beauty and the Beast

Emma Watson and Dan Stevens star in Disney’s live action remake along with an A-list cast including Emma Thompson (Mrs. Potts), Ewan McGregor (Lumiere), Kevin Kline (Maurice), Luke Evans (Gaston), Josh Gad, (LeFou) Ian McKellen (Cogsworth) and new characters, including Stanley Tucci’s Cadenza. The film, released 26 years after the 1991 classic, chronicles the animated version along with providing a backstory to many of the original characters’ past.

THR film critic Leslie Felperin called the film called the film a “Michelin-triple-starred master class in patisserie skills that transforms the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush into a kind of crystal meth-like narcotic high that lasts about two hours.” Read the full review here.

The Belko Experiment

Tony Goldwyn, John Gallagher Jr. and John C. McGinley, Adria Arjona and Sean Gunn star in director Greg McLean’s horror film about a social experiment where 80 Americans are locked in a high-rise corporate office in Bogota, Colombia. They are forced to play a deadly game where they must kill three of their coworkers or six will die — and the experiment only gets worse from there. THR film critic John DeFore writes in his review that the film is “vicious, mostly satisfying action.” He adds that “genre fans will be appreciative, but mainstream appeal is limited.”

T2: Trainspotting

Ewan McGregor reteams with director Danny Boyle for the sequel to the 1996 cult hit film Trainspotting where McGregor’s rebellious Scottish heroin addict reunites with his his drug friends after 20 years. THR film critic Neil Young writes in his review that the “darkly larkish, crime-flavored character-comedy” is a “much-delayed and disappointingly redundant follow-up.”

Song to Song

Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman star in Terrence Malick’s film set in the Austin, Texas music scene. The film, which was the opening-night film at South by Southwest, follows two intersecting love triangles between a music executive (Fassbender), his business partner (Gosling), a budding musician (Mara) and an ex-teacher (Portman). DeFore writes, “Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films, and is unlikely to fare much better at the box office. If it does, credit the draw of Ryan Gosling, whose younger fans will be wholly unprepared for what they get (and don’t get) here.”

Burn Your Maps

Room‘s Jacob Tremblay stars as eight-year-old Wes, who is convinced that he is a Mongolian goat herder. After Wes befriends an Indian immigrant who is an aspiring documentary filmmaker and one of his mother’s students, a crowdfunding scheme sends the two of them and Wes’ mother (Vera Farmiga) to none other than Mongolia. The film is based on the short story by Robyn Joy Leff.

Atomica

When communications shut down at an isolated power plant in the desert, a young female safety inspector flies out to fix the problem and realizes that the two employees who work onsite are not who they seem to be. The Syfy film is opening in select theaters on March 17 and on digital HD on March 21.