Bullock, Watts take the lead in Friday film action

Above : Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum star in “The Lost City,” which opens on Friday. (Photo/Paramount Pictures)

Along with a slate that includes many of the 2022 Oscar nominees (and the movie I already wrote about that’s opening at the Magic Lantern), Friday will feature a couple of new releases – both featuring woman at their centers.

“The Lost City” : Just as Kathleen Turner did in the 1984 romantic adventure “Romancing the Stone,” Sandra Bullock plays a romance novelist who gets waylaid (in this case by a scoundrel played by Daniel Radcliffe) into a jungle adventure. Along the way, she is accompanied by a well-meaning but clueless book-cover model (Channing Tatum). Also, look for Brad Pitt in a cameo.

Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times wrote, “Bullock and Tatum take hold of the material and turn it into an enchanted screwball.”

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Nothing in ‘Lost City’ would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.”

And Peter Debruge of Variety wrote, “ ‘The Lost City’ won’t be nominated for any Oscars, but it repeats what Spielberg and Lucas did for ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ mining a century-old genre for inspiration and polishing those tropes for a new generation.”

“Infinite Storm” : Adapted from real-life events, and directed by Polish-born filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska, this survival tale features Naomi Watts as Pam Bales, a woman who, caught in a blizzard while mountain climbing, ends up struggling not just to save herself but a lost man she stumbles across.

Robert Abele of TheWrap wrote, “With her regular cinematographer Michal Englert in fine form, Szumowska’s imagery and pacing captures what’s meditative and bracingly physical about Pam’s snowy morning hike, and what’s simultaneously breathtaking and ominous about the terrain and its weather.”

Dennis Harvey of Variety wrote, “If it falls a bit short as human drama… Szumowska’s latest – a 180-degree turn from her last, the excellent Polish allegorical tale ‘Never Gonna Snow Again’ – is fully satisfying as an appreciation of Nature as magnificent adversary.”

And that’s it for the moment. I’ll update at the week progresses.